This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our society has progressed largely because of our creativity and inquisitiveness – and because we’re competitive. We’re driven by the desire to develop products and services which are more ingenious than what others have put forth. Competition is inherently good, but when it is tainted with excess greed or negative motives, there can be harmful results. How we compete is very important to our Souls.
Competition | Creativity | Desire | Excess | Good | Greed | Important | Inquisitiveness | Motives | Society | Society |
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few… My life… lacks this quality of significance and therefore beauty, because there is so little empty space. The space is scribbled on; the time has been filled. There are so few empty pages in my engagement pad, or empty hours in the day, or empty rooms in my life in which to stand alone and find myself. Too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures – an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant.
Beauty | Day | Excess | Important | Life | Life | Little | People | Space | Time | Engagement |
The greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity.
Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
Minds, like bodies will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities, and the fountain of all our diseases. As a lamp is choked by a superabundance of oil, a fire extinguished by excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by intemperate diet.
Obstinacy, sir, is certainly a great vice; and in the changeful state of political affairs it is frequently the cause of great mischief. It happens, however, very unfortunately, that almost the whole line of the great and masculine virtues - constancy, gravity, magnanimity, fortitude, fidelity, and firmness - are closely allied to this disagreeable quality, of which you have so jut an abhorrence; and in their excess all these virtues very easily fall into it.
Cause | Constancy | Excess | Fidelity | Firmness | Fortitude | Magnanimity |
Goodness answers to the theological virtue charity, and admits no excess but error. The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall. But in charity there is no excess; neither can angel or man come in danger by it.
Angels | Charity | Danger | Desire | Error | Excess | Knowledge | Man | Power | Virtue | Virtue | Danger |
It is impossible to indulge in habitual severity of opinion upon our fellow-men without injuring the tenderness and delicacy of our own feelings.
Feelings | Men | Opinion | Tenderness |
Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions. Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, though from an opposite cause. Government is instituted to protect property of every sort, as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.
Cause | Excess | Government | Liberty | Man | Possessions | Power | Property | Rights | Safe | Government |
The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.