This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The bedrock of character is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-control.
Character | Control | Discipline | Life | Life | Self | Self-control |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
The noble person tries to create harmony in the human heart by a rediscovery of human nature, and tries to promote music as a means to the perfection of human culture. When such music prevails and the people’s minds are led toward the right ideas and aspirations, we may see the appearance of a great nation. Character is the backbone of our human nature, and music is the flowing of character... The poem gives expression to our heart, the song gives expression to our voice, and the dance gives expression to our movements. these three arts take their rise from the human soul, and then are given further expressions by means of musical instruments.
Appearance | Character | Culture | Harmony | Heart | Human nature | Ideas | Means | Music | Nature | People | Perfection | Right | Soul | Poem |
The society of incipient population decline develops in its typical members a social character whose conformity is insured by their tendency to be sensitized to the expectations and preferences of others.
Character | Conformity | Society | Society |
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor
There is nothing so fatal to character as half finished tasks.
When you are irritated by his ‘pretentiousness’, you betray the character of your own: it is just as it should be that he increases while you decrease. Choose your opponents. To the wrong ones, you cannot afford to give a thought, but you must help the right ones, help them and yourself in a contest without tension.
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned into it), are the natural securities for this transmission.
Avarice | Benevolence | Circumstances | Distinction | Family | Possessions | Power | Property | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Weakness | Wealth | Society |
Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant of both the character they leave and of the character they assume.
Weakness of character is the only defect which cannot be amended.
Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.
Character | Man | Reputation |
A man’s character is like his shadow which sometimes follows, ands sometimes precedes him, and which is occasionally longer, occasionally shorter than he is.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
It is only man who is good, and he is good only because he can also be evil. Good and evil are inseparable, and their inseparability is rooted in the fact that the concept becomes an object to itself, and as object it eo ipso acquires the character of difference. The evil will wills something opposed to the university of the will, while the good will acts in accordance with its true concept.
The quantum field is seen as the fundamental physical entity; a continuous medium which is present everywhere in space. Particles are merely local condensations of the field; concentrations of energy which come and go, thereby losing their individual character and dissolving into the underlying field.
Character | Energy | Individual | Present | Space |
Beauty, purity, respectability, religion, morality, art, patriotism, bravery and the rest… are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and enslaved. This is the family secret of the governing class.
Art | Beauty | Bravery | Civilization | Family | Morality | Patriotism | Purity | Religion | Rest | Words |
My retirement was now become solitude; the former is, I believe, the best state for the mind of man, the latter almost the worse. In complete solitude, the eye wants objects, the heart wants reciprocation. The character loses its tenderness when it has nothing to strengthen it, its sweetness when it has nothing to soothe it.
Character | Heart | Man | Mind | Nothing | Retirement | Solitude | Tenderness | Wants |
I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortune. Those disasters which break down the spirit of man and prostrate him in the dust seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character that at times it approaches to sublimity.