This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In the so-called Western secular democracy… a divorce has been effected between politics and religion, and as a result of this secularization, the society and particularly its politically active elements have ceased to attach much or any importance to morality or ethics.
Democracy | Ethics | Morality | Politics | Religion | Society | Society |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
He who wants to set a good example must add a grain of foolishness to his virtue; then others can imitate and, at the same time, rise above the one being imitated – something which people love.
Example | Good | Love | People | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Wants |
Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL
It is of primary importance that a certain space of time be allotted daily to meditation on eternal things. No priest can omit this without serious manifestation of negligence and without a grave loss to his soul.
Words are things. Thoughts are things. Where your thoughts are, you are. When we learn to discipline and control our thoughts and feelings, and use only the positive, constructive words, sent forth with divine love, our body and mind respond to that righteousness – right-use-ness. The right use and selection of words is of vital importance but equally important is the feeling behind those words, for feeling is the motivating power that makes the words live.
Body | Control | Discipline | Feelings | Important | Love | Mind | Power | Right | Righteousness | Words | Learn |
People never improve unless they look to some standard or example higher or better than themselves.
Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.
The life that conquers is the life that moves with a steady resolution and persistence toward a predetermined goal. Those who succeed are those who have thoroughly learned the immense importance of plan in life, and the tragic brevity of time.
Life | Life | Persistence | Plan | Resolution | Time | Brevity |
The tendency to form hierarchies shows itself in petty ways in corporations and bureaucracies, where people place enormous importance on how big their office is and how many windows it has. None of this shows that hierarchy is good, or desirable, or even inevitable; but it does show that getting rid of it is not going to be as easy as previous revolutionaries thought.
Good | Inevitable | Office | People | Thought |
Human beings seek a prior meaning in everything as a defense against doubts about the importance of anything, including man's existence ... To affirm that there is a supreme meaning of life is to give the intellect an opportunity to escape the disquieting conclusion that nothing people do can possibly have more than slight importance.
Defense | Existence | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Nothing | Opportunity | People | Intellect |
Amelia Earhart, fully Amelia Mary Earhart
No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.
The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.
Chance | Fate | Ideas | Individual | Fate |
One of the striking characteristics of successful persons is their faculty of determining the relative importance of different things. There are many things which it is more desirable to do, a few are essential, and there is no more useful quality of the human mind than that which enables its possessor at once to distinguish which the few essential things are... Let one adopt the practice of reflecting, every morning, what must necessarily be done during the day, and then begin by doing the most important things first, leaving the others to take their chance of being done or left undone.
The way of exoteric religion is to progressively replace egoism by submission to the will of God. Its four cardinal demands are faith, love, humility, and good deeds. In so far as they are complied with, they effectively bring a man towards Self-realization, even though he does not consciously envisage this. True, the Goal is not likely to be attained in this lifetime, but in God’s patience a lifetime is very little. Faith strengthens the intuitional conviction of the reality of God or the Self. Humility, its counterpart, weakens the belief in the ego and lessens the importance attached to it. Love strives to surrender the ego to God and its welfare to others. Good deeds deny egoism in practice and are alike the fruit and proof of love and humility.
Belief | Deeds | Ego | Faith | God | Good | Humility | Little | Love | Man | Patience | Practice | Reality | Religion | Self | Self-realization | Submission | Surrender | Will | Deeds | God |
The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
Nature |