This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William J. H. Boetcker, fully William John Henry Boetcker
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Your awareness of your self-worth is not a contradiction to the obligation to be humble. Humility is not a lack of awareness of your positive accomplishments and abilities. Only a fool is not aware of what he really is an this is not humility. Humility is the internalized awareness with every fiber of your body that everything, yes everything, you have is not your own. Rather it is a gift from the Almighty who bestowed His kindness on you. The more a person actually feels that what he has is a gift the greater is his humility.
Awareness | Body | Character | Contradiction | Humility | Kindness | Obligation | Self | Self-worth | Worth | Awareness |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality... only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
Art | Character | Common Sense | Ecstasy | Life | Life | Means | Rationality | Sense | Spirit | Art |
Susan Fenimore Cooper, fully Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper
What a noble gift to man are the forests! What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe to their beauty and their utility! How pleasantly the shadows of the wood fall upon our heads when we turn from the glitter and turmoil of the world of man!
Admiration | Beauty | Character | Debt | Gratitude | Man | Turmoil | Wisdom | World | Beauty |
Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL
You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.
Care | Character | Education | Enemy | Experience | Good | Hunger | Ideas | Kill | Language | Man | Means | Men | Nations | Nothing | People | Will | Wise |
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
Learn to laugh. And most of all, learn to laugh at yourself. The person who can give a riotous account of his own faux pas, will never have to listen to another's embarrassing account of it. He will rarely know the sting of humiliation. His a delight to be with, but more important, he is enjoying his own life, and applying to his ills and errors the most soothing balm the human spirit has devised - laughter.
Character | Important | Laughter | Life | Life | Spirit | Will | Wisdom | Learn |
The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people's energy, intellect and virtues... Progress, the growth of intelligence and power, is the end and boon of liberty; and, without this, a people may have the name, but want the substance and spirit of freedom.
Character | Energy | Freedom | Growth | Intelligence | Liberty | People | Power | Progress | Spirit | Worth | Intellect |
The best answer to all objections urged against prayer is that fact that man cannot help praying; for we may be sure that which is so spontaneous and ineradicable in human nature has its fitting objects and methods in the arrangement of a boundless Providence.
Character | Human nature | Man | Nature | Prayer | Providence |
Envy is an ill-natured vice, and is made up of meanness and malice. It wishes the force of goodness to be strained, and the measure of happiness abated. It laments over prosperity, and sickens at the sight of health. It oftentimes wants spirit as well as good nature.
Character | Envy | Force | Good nature | Good | Health | Malice | Meanness | Nature | Prosperity | Spirit | Wants | Wishes | Happiness |
A friend is not so much one to whom you can go for help when you are in trouble. That has its value. But a friend is one to whom you can go when he is in trouble.