This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A man of integrity will never listen to any plea against conscience.
Character | Conscience | Integrity | Man | Will |
Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.
Character | Experience | Man |
Self-knowledge leading to self-hatred and humility, is the condition of the love and knowledge of God. Spiritual exercises that make use of distractions have this great merit, that they increase self-knowledge. Every soul that approaches God must be aware of who and what it is. To practice a form of mental or vocal prayer that is, so to speak, above one’s moral station is to act a lie: and the consequences of such lying are wrong notions about God, idolatrous worship of private and unrealistic phantasies and (for lack of the humility of self-knowledge) spiritual pride.
Character | Consequences | God | Humility | Knowledge | Love | Lying | Merit | Practice | Prayer | Pride | Self | Self-hatred | Self-knowledge | Soul | Worship | Wrong | God |
E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe
A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.
Character | Man | Money | Principles |
E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe
No man ever knows the few joys of living without some sort of success to his credit. Of all the games worth a candle, success is first. The greatest punishment is to be despised by your neighbors, the world and members of your family.
Character | Credit | Family | Man | Punishment | Success | World | Worth |
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are certain moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Mortifications have their reward in a state of consciousness that corresponds, on a lower level, to spiritual beatitude. The artist - and the philosopher and the man of science are also artists - knows the bliss of aesthetic contemplation, discovery and non-attached possession. The goods of the intellect, the emotions and the imagination are real goods; but they are not the final good, and when we treat them as ends in themselves, we fall into idolatry. Mortification of will, desire and action is not enough; there must also be mortification in the fields of knowing, thinking feeling and fancying.
Action | Aesthetic | Character | Consciousness | Contemplation | Desire | Discovery | Emotions | Ends | Enough | Good | Imagination | Knowing | Man | Reward | Science | Thinking | Will | Discovery |
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
Character | Consciousness | Habit | Little | Man | People | Soul |
E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe
I take them to be the only rich man that lives upon what he has, owes nothing, and is contented; for there is no determinate sum of money, nor quantity of estate, that can denote a man rich, since no man is truly rich that has not so much as perfectly satiates his desire of having more; for the desire of more is want, and want is poverty.
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
Character | Man | Position | Responsibility | Will |
Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
The covetous man always wants.
E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe
Every man is a reformer until reform tramps on his toes.
The contradiction between what is requested of man and what can be offered to him has become so striking, the ideology so thin, the discontents in civilization so great that they must be compensated through annihilation of those who do not conform, political enemies, Jews, asocial persons, the insane. The new order of fascism is reason revealing itself as unreason.
Character | Civilization | Contradiction | Man | Order | Reason |