This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
If you wish to be like the gods on earth, to be free in the realms of the dead, pluck not the fruit from the garden! In appearance it may glisten to the eye; but the perishable pleasure of possession quickly avenges the curse of curiosity.
Appearance | Curiosity | Earth | Pleasure | Wisdom |
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
Our safety is not in blindness, but in facing our dangers.
Wisdom |
There must be some supreme, universal design. Each of us comes to life and stays in the world for predestined period. Some leave forever, sometimes without a trace; others stay for a long time, both in life and in memory. We remain longest - we make a difference - when we manage to act not for ourselves but for others. It is possible to create good and evil. The greatest and most important thing a person can do is to understand that where good exists, evil also resides; what’s more, one must strive to stay on the side of righteousness, doing one’s best to promote good in the world. Only you can make this choice. You alone will be held responsible - by other people, by your progeny and by history.
Choice | Design | Evil | Good | History | Important | Life | Life | Memory | People | Righteousness | Time | Will | Wisdom | World | Understand |
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. Not being able to enlarge the one, let us contract the other; for it is from their difference that all evils arise which render us unhappy.
Imagination | Reality | Wisdom | World |
Curiosity is the direct incontinency of the spirit. Know therefore at the door before you enter upon your neighbor’s privacy; and remember that there is no difference between entering into his house and looking into it.
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasure activity.
Aspiration | Fortune | Joy | Pleasure | Wisdom | Aspiration |
Hugh Walpole, fully Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole
Don't play for safety - it's the most dangerous thing in the world.
The best definition of wealth - the only true definition, I think - is the possession of whatever gives us happiness, contentment or a sense of one's significance in the scheme of things.
Contentment | Sense | Wealth | Wisdom | Think |
There is a vast difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration is a concession; liberty is a right; toleration is a matter of expediency; liberty is a matter of principle; toleration is a grant of man; liberty is a gift of God.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
When a child begins to move in the midst of the objects that surround him, he is instinctively led to appropriate to himself everything that he can lay his hands upon; he has no notion of the property of others; but as he gradually learns the value of things and begins to perceive that he may in his turn be despoiled, he becomes more circumspect, and he ends by respecting those rights in others which he wishes to have respected in himself. The principle which the child derives from the possession of his toys is taught to the man by the objects which he may call his own.
Ends | Man | Property | Rights | Wisdom | Wishes | Child | Value |
We are exactly like a galaxy in or fine anatomy. Matter moves through you and me as easily as the wind blows through the branches of a tree. And the boundaries we draw at the limits of our skin are as arbitrary as those which separate our solar system from the next one. Everything is indeed connected to everything else, in the best traditions of ecology, but it goes further than that. Everything is everything else. There is no difference - and nothing is impossible.
Joe D. Batten and Leonard C. Hudson
The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person is the difference between get and give. The unhappy person is concerned with: the world is against me, what’s in it for me, what are people doing to me, and so forth. When your central theme in life is getting you usually do get headaches. But the happy person is looking toward what he can do, what he can give, what he can accomplish.
Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger
The consciousness of abiding safety in the bosom of the Church is one of the most serious obstacles to an honest confrontation with the Christian faith.
Church | Consciousness | Faith |
William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
The most important thing in life is not simply to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The most important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence and it marks the difference between a man of sense and a fool.