This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If vanity does not entirely overthrow the virtues, at least it makes them all totter.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
Silence |
What renders other people's vanity insufferable is that it wounds our own... The most violent passions sometimes leave us at rest, but vanity agitates us constantly.
That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.
Men are more satirical from vanity than form malice.
What we take for virtues is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry know how to arrange; and it is not always from valor and from chastity that men are valiant, an that women are chaste.
Chastity | Fortune | Industry | Men | Nothing | Valor | Valor |
The great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.
It is our own vanity that makes the vanity of others intolerable to us.
We probably have a greater love for those we support than those who support us. Our vanity carries more weight than our self-interest... There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.
Giving | Love | Self | Self-interest |
Love is the expansion of two nature in such fashion that each includes the other, each is enriched by the other.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first freedom is speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world-terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world-terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.
Aggression | Fear | Freedom from fear | Freedom | Future | God | Life | Life | Means | Position | Speech | Time | Vision | Will | World | Worship | God |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Man is an animal, formidable both from his passions and his reasons; his passions often urging him to great evils, and his reason furnishing means to achieve them. To train this animal, and make him amenable to order, to inure him to a sense of justice and virtue, to withhold him from ill courses by fear, and encourage him in his duty by hopes, in short to fashion and model him for society, hath been the aim of civil and religious institutions; and, in all times, the endeavor of good and wise men. The aptest method for attaining this end hath been always judged a proper education.
Duty | Education | Fear | Good | Justice | Man | Means | Men | Method | Model | Order | Reason | Sense | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Wise |
Associate yourself with men of good quality, if you esteem your reputation. Be not apt to relate news, if you know not the truth thereof. Speak no evil of the absent, for it is unjust. Undertake not what you cannot perform, be be careful to keep your promise. There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth, and pursue it steadily. Nothing but harmony, honesty, industry and frugality are necessary to make us a great and happy nation.
Esteem | Evil | Frugality | Good | Happy | Harmony | Honesty | Industry | Men | News | Nothing | Promise | Reputation | Truth |
A man in old age is like a sword in the shop window. Men that look upon the perfect blade do not imagine the process by which it was completed. Man is a sword; daily life is the workshop; and God the artificer; and those cares which beats upon the anvil, and file the edge, and eat in, acid-like, the inscription on the hilt - those are the very things that fashion the man.
All are architects of fate, working in these walls of Time; some with massive deed and great, some with ornaments of rhyme. Nothing useless is, or low; each thing in its place is best; and what seems idle show strengthens and supports the rest. For the structure that we raise, time is with materials filled; our todays and yesterdays are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these; leaving no yawning gaps between; think not, because no man sees, such things will remain unseen.