This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Whatever deprives a man of personal individual motive for self-improvement and robust exertion will not make him free, but on the contrary more servile and in the long run less intelligent, industrious and free, for freedom is a matter of character and will power.
Character | Freedom | Improvement | Individual | Man | Power | Self | Self-improvement | Will |
A primary responsibility of educators is that they not only be aware of the general principle of the shaping of actual experience by environing conditions, but that they also recognize in the concrete what surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all that they have to contribute to building up experiences that are worthwhile.
What is sometimes called an act of self-expression might better be termed one of self-exposure; it discloses character - or lack of character - to others. In itself, it is only a spewing forth.
We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.
Character | Experience | Future | Meaning | Present | Time |
Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle
The man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.
Character | Difficulty | Man |
Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle
Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself.
Heartlessness and fascination, in about equal quantities, constitute the receipt for forming the character of coquette.
Search for a single, inclusive good is doomed to failure. Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning.
Character | Experience | Failure | Good | Life | Life | Meaning | Search | Unique | Happiness |
Exaggerated respect for athletics, an excess of coarse impressions brought about by the technical discoveries of recent years, the increased severity of the struggle for existence due to the economic crisis, the brutalization of political life: all these factors are hostile to the ripening of the character and the desire for real culture, and stamp our age as barbarous, materialistic and superficial.
Age | Athletics | Character | Culture | Desire | Excess | Existence | Life | Life | Respect | Struggle | Respect |
“What” we do belongs to the world. In the “how,” the way we do it, we infallibly revel to ourselves whether our attitude is in harmony with the inner law or in contradiction to it, in accordance with our right form or opposed to it, open to Divine Being or closed to it. What is our right “form”? It is none other than that in which we are transparent to Divine Being. And to be transparent means that we are able to experience Divine Being in our selves and to reveal it in the world.
Character | Contradiction | Experience | Harmony | Law | Means | Right | World |
J. L. M. Curry, fully Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry
A state to prosper, must be built on foundations of moral character, and, this character is the principal element of its strength, and the only guaranty of its permanence and prosperity.
Character | Prosperity | Strength |
Ilya Ehrenburg, fully Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg
Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.
Some people gauge their value by what they own. But in reality the entire concept of ownership of possessions is based on an illusion. When you obtain a material object, it does not become part of you. Ownership is merely your right to use specific objects whenever you wish and that no one has a right to take them away from you. How unfortunate is the person who has an ambition to cleave to something impossible to cleave to. Such a person will not obtain what he desires and will experience suffering.
Ambition | Character | Experience | Illusion | Object | People | Possessions | Reality | Right | Suffering | Will | Ambition | Value |
The influences of little things are as real, and as constantly about us, as the air we breathe or the light by which we see. These are the small - the often invisible - the almost unthought of strands, which are inweaving and twisting by millions, to bind us to character - to good or evil here, and to heaven or hell hereafter.
Education begins with life. Before we are aware the foundations of character are laid, and subsequent teaching avails but little to remove or alter them... If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Character | Education | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Man |