This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A person, whose heart is pure, remains untouched by 'pain' just as an assiduous person remains aloof from sinful deeds.
There is none to question Me if I do not act; there is nothing I would lose if I do not engage in activity. Nor have I any great urge to be active. But yet, you see Me very active. The reason is, I must be doing something all the time, for your sake, as an example, as an inspiration, as a piece of training.
Those, who indulge excessively in material and sensual pleasures approach death with fear and inevitably fall prey to the wrath of death.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
If we know not its love, its intellect, neither the worm within my belly seeks to know me, but his petty mischief wreaks:— thus it behooves us to be circumspect.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Take it on the mercy of God to punish unnecessarily.
Ignorance | Industry | Intelligence | Knowledge | Men |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Neither the gifts nor the blows of fortune equal those of nature.
Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
The image of the Buddha on the altar is clearly not a divinity or Sage. It is a representation, an artistic image ... that points back to human who realized the highest wisdom. The Buddha cultivated his nature to an awakened state. The image symbolizes his realization of humanity's potential and aspiration for the highest goodness and compassion. When you bow, symbolically you honor your own potential for great wisdom. Furthermore, bowing is good exercise. It is not idol worship, which is superstitious and passive. Bowing to the Buddha is a practice of a principle; it is dynamic and active.
Anger | Blame | Conduct | Good | Ignorance | Mind | Praise |
We never do evil so thoroughly and heartily as when led to it by an honest but perverted, because mistaken, conscience.
Distinction | Ignorance | Inquiry |
Where there are no sheep, they call goats Abdur Rahim Chelebi.(In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!)
He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil.
If you were to rise early every morning, as an instance of self-denial, as a method of renouncing indulgence, as a means of redeeming your time and of fitting your spirit for prayer, you would find mighty advantages from it. This method, though it seem such a small circumstance of life, would in all probability be a means [toward] great piety. It would keep it constantly in your head that softness and idleness were to be avoided and that self-denial... It would teach you to exercise power over yourself, and make you able by degrees to renounce other pleasures and tempers that war against the soul.
When a teacher of the future comes to point out to the youth of America how the highest rewards of intellect and devotion can be gained, he may say to them, not by subtlety and intrigue not by wire pulling and demagoguery not by the arts of popularity not by skill and shiftiness in following expediency but by being firm in devotion to the principles of manhood and the application of morals and the courage of righteousness in the public life of our country by being a man without guile and without fear, without selfishness, and with devotion to duty, devotion to his country.
Better | Character | Evil | Folly | Government | Ignorance | Indifference | Indolence | Knowledge | Law | Life | Life | Little | Mind | Nature | Responsibility | Suffering | Time | World | Wrong | Government |
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.