This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To make the people fittest to choose, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education , to teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, modesty, sobriety, parsimony, justice; not to admire wealth or honor; to hate turbulence and ambition; to place every one his private welfare and happiness in the public peace, liberty and safety.
Ambition | Education | Faith | Hate | Honor | Justice | Liberty | Modesty | Peace | People | Public | Teach | Virtue | Virtue | Wealth | Will | Happiness |
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thicksighted.
Ambition | Character | Imagination | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Space | Ambition |
John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
Music is edifying, for from time to time, it sets the soul in operation.
It’s often during the hardest times, rather than the most peaceful ones, that you find a purpose that gives meaning to your days so that your life becomes a blessing. The passion born of meaning is more than a psychological breakthrough or an emotional coping strategy. It’s a glimpse into the soul that elevates life’s predictable hardships into sacred quests.
Life | Life | Meaning | Passion | Purpose | Purpose | Sacred | Soul |
John Ciardi, fully John Anthony Ciardi
A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.
To nourish the soul means to become kinder, more compassionate, wiser, and more loving, often through the making of difficult choices that foster growth rather than safety.
Look underfoot. You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Don't despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.
Despise | Opportunity | Power |
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 |
The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life, or less; but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are. A man is to be cheated into passion, but reasoned into truth.
Anger | Fear | Life | Life | Love | Man | Passion | Soul | Truth | Instruction |
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.
Eternity | Grace | Heart | Individual | Principles | Purity | Self | Thought | World | Thought |
Our life is at all times and before all else the consciousness of what we can do.
Consciousness | Life | Life |
A soul exasperated by its ills, falls out with everything, with its friend and itself.
John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.
No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.