This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself; about what you want, what you like, what you respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.
God | Little | Love | Nature | Nothing | People | Respect | Sin | Study | Will | Wisdom | Respect | God | Think |
Be willing to pity the misery of the stranger! Thou givest to-day thy bread to the poor; to-morrow the poor may give it to thee.
To be mistaken is a misfortune to be pitied; but to know the truth and not to conform one's actions to it is a crime which Heaven and Earth condemn.
Crime | Earth | Heaven | Misfortune | Truth | Wisdom | Misfortune |
Babe Paley, fully Barbara Cushing "Babe" Mortimer Paley
The common course of things is in favor of happiness. Happiness is the rule, misery the exception. Were the order reversed, our attention would be called to examples of health and competency, instead of disease and want.
Attention | Disease | Health | Order | Rule | Wisdom | Happiness |
Martha Washington, fully Martha Dandridge Curtis Washington
I am still determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may be, for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go.
Circumstances | Experience | Happy | Wisdom | Happiness |
Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
The world is full of wickedness and misery precisely because it is based on freedom – yet that freedom constitutes the whole dignity of man and of his world. Doubtless at the price of its repudiation evil and suffering could be abolished, and the world forced to be “good” and “happy”; but man would have lost his likeness to God, which primarily resides in his freedom.
Dignity | Evil | Freedom | God | Good | Happy | Man | Price | Suffering | Wickedness | World |
Before crime is committed, conscience must be corrupted.
Conscience | Crime |
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.
Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
Will |