This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is one of the worst of errors to suppose that there is any other path of safety except that of duty.
A guilty conscience is a hell on earth, and points to one beyond.
Character | Conscience | Earth | Hell | Guilty |
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
True friendship... always involves the dominance of benevolent impulses, tending toward the benefit of the beloved, whereas the counterfeits of friendship spring primarily or purely from acquisitive desire - seeking something for one’s self.
Character | Desire | Self | Friendship |
There is no unmixed good in human affairs; the best principles, if pushed to excess, degenerate into fatal vices. Generosity is nearly allied to extravagance; charity itself may lead to ruin; the sternness of justice is but one step removed from the severity of oppression. It is the same in the political world; the tranquillity of despotism resembles the stagnation of the Dead Sea; the fever of innovation the tempests of the ocean It would seem as if, at particular periods, from causes inscrutable to human wisdom, a universal frenzy seizes mankind; reason, experience, prudence, are alike blinded; and the very classes who are to perish in the storm are the first to raise its fury.
Character | Charity | Excess | Experience | Extravagance | Fury | Generosity | Good | Innovation | Justice | Mankind | Oppression | Principles | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Tranquility | Wisdom | World |
As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.
Character | Melancholy | Poverty | Work |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
To have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more wilt thou see?
There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence.
Absence | Character | Excellence | Qualities |
S'rîmad Bhâgavatam, aka Bhâgavata Purâna or Bhāgavata
Learn to look with an equal eye upon all beings, seeing the one Self in all.