This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Solitary we must be in life's great hours of moral decisions; solitary in pain and sorrow; solitary in old age and in our going forth at death. Fortunate the man who has learned what to do in solitude and brought himself to see what companionship he may discover in it, what fortitude, what content.
Age | Character | Death | Fortitude | Life | Life | Man | Old age | Pain | Solitude | Sorrow | Companionship | Old |
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.
Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one every thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
Age | Good | Myth | People | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Old | Thought |
We are too much inclined to underrate the power of moral influence, the influence of public opinion, and the influence of the principles to which great men - the lights of the world, and of the present age - have given their sanction.
Age | Character | Influence | Men | Opinion | Power | Present | Principles | Public | World |
Nathan Ackerman, fully Nathan Ward Ackerman
The image of self and the image of family are reciprocally interdependent.
Family | Interdependent | Self | Wisdom |
Mankind is a creature of space, a space race living on a planet in orbit around a star, as others are also doing. Mankind is not unique, as he fondly imagines. He is merely a part of the vast interstellar human family bred and nurtured by us through the eons of time on planets in different solar systems throughout the galaxy.
Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sounds like heresy or plots.