This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against and not with the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm. Let no man wax pale, therefore, because of opposition.
Better | Man | Opposition | Wisdom |
We want to live our lives as wise warriors and die as men. We may not even know what it is until the moments of our deaths. Then, the questions come. Have we worked to release another soul from pain? Have we opened a way that was once closed? Have we learned from the steeps and dips? Then we can rest assured that we have lived as men and died as warriors.
If we start with the visible, then in order to explain it we must pass into its parts. If we seek to explain man by his organs, his organs by the cells composing them, the atoms by electrons, we lose sight of the man as a whole. Under the microscope the man himself completely disappears... The idea behind organised matter is overlooked. That which is manifest in time and space engages its attention, and so it cannot help looking for causal origin in the smaller constituent parts of any organism - and also in preceding time, i.e. in the past.
William Paley, Archdeacon of Saragossa
Old age brings us to know the value of the blessings which we have enjoyed, and it brings us also to a very thankful perception of those which yet remain. Is a man advanced in life? The ease of a single day, the rest of a single night, are gifts which may be subjects of gratitude to God.
Age | Blessings | Day | God | Gratitude | Life | Life | Man | Old age | Perception | Rest | Wisdom | Value |
And yet we are very apt to be full of ourselves, instead of Him that made what we so much value, and but for whom we can have no reason to value ourselves. For we have nothing that we can call our own, no, not ourselves; for we are all but tenants, and at will too, of the great Lord of ourselves, and the rest of this great farm, the world that we live upon.
Lord | Nothing | Reason | Rest | Will | Wisdom | World | Value |
The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading. But a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep-freighted with truth and with beauty.
Beauty | Books | Learning | Reading | Thought | Truth | Wisdom | Think |
The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and with beauty.
Beauty | Books | Learning | Reading | Thought | Truth | Wisdom | Think |
Can a man control his future? Yes. Despite the system they live under, men everywhere have, I believe, more power over the future than ever before. The important thing is that we must choose to exercise it. What we do today determines how the world shall go, for tomorrow is made up of the sum total of today's experiences... Far from feeling hopeless or helpless, we must seize every opportunity, however small, to help the world around us toward peace, productivity and human brotherhood.
Brotherhood | Control | Future | Important | Man | Men | Opportunity | Peace | Power | System | Tomorrow | Wisdom | World |
The surest eventuality in life is death... You always have to do your best in whatever work comes your way. Only then can you express your gratitude for having been endowed with life. Only then can you rest assured of reaching paradise after death.
Death | Gratitude | Life | Life | Paradise | Rest | Wisdom | Work |
William Ramsay, fully Sir William Ramsay
The noblest exercise of the mind within doors, and most befitting a person of quality, is study.
Where we consider the world around us, we cannot help noticing that there is a great deal of recurrence or repetition in it. The same colour recurs over and over again in ever so many things. Shapes repeat themselves likewise.