This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Every vital organization owes its birth and life to an exciting and daring idea.
Birth | Daring | Life | Life | Organization |
Want is a bitter and hateful good, because its virtues are not understood; yet many things, impossible to thought, have been by need to full perfection brought; the daring of the soul proceeds from thence, sharpness of wit and active diligence; prudence at once, and fortitude it gives; and, if in patience taken, mends our lives.
Daring | Diligence | Fortitude | Good | Need | Patience | Perfection | Prudence | Prudence | Soul | Thought | Wit |
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Daring | Disease | Loneliness | People |
It would not be going too far to assert that… conflict confronts every woman who ventures upon a career of her own and hwo is… unwilling to pay for her daring with the renunciation of her femininity.
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Belief | Courage | Daring | Energy | History | Hope | Injustice | Injustice | Man | Oppression | Time |
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. n.
Belief | Change | Courage | Daring | Energy | Events | Greatness | History | Man | Oppression | Time | Will | Work |
Sherwood Eddy, born George Sherwood Eddy
Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence. Faith is daring to do something regardless of the consequences.
Consequences | Daring | Evidence | Faith |
A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can. It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer, nobler type of manhood. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of the life and the duty of life.
Courage | Daring | Duty | Endurance | Fear | Ideals | Joy | Life | Life | Man | Misfortune | Usefulness |
It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at last fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
Achievement | Better | Cause | Credit | Critic | Daring | Deeds | Defeat | Man | Deeds |
The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his cravings for power and possessions. Non-attached even to science and speculation and philanthropy.
Man | Philanthropy | Possessions | Power | Science | Speculation |
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth
Art | Daring | Life | Life | Mystery | Reality | Trust | Vision | Art |
But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.
Little | Sense | Speculation | Understanding |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.
Mankind | Speculation | Zeal |
In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.
Art | Daring | Evil | Existence | Good | Honor | Indifference | Judgment | Man | Nothing | Opinion | Pleasure | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Receive | Art | Learn | Vice |
Faith is not a clinging to a shrine but the endless, tameless pilgrimage of hearts. Audacious longing, calling, calling, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind – it is all a stalwart driving to the precious serving of Him who rings our hearts like a bell, wishing to enter our empty perishing life.