This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
A religious man is guided in his activity not by the consequences of his action, but by the consciousness of the destination of his life.
Action | Consciousness | Consequences | Life | Life | Man |
Learning to accede to smaller demands so as not to have to grant larger ones is part of the art of leadership. The difficulty is that narrow concessions may also spread into wide ones.
Art | Difficulty | Learning | Art |
Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Hard as it is for us to escape the effects of our own feelings, nobody seems to have difficulty in rejecting the feelings of others as merely subjective and vulnerable to interference from the demons of self-deception and self-delusion.
Delusion | Difficulty | Feelings | Self | Self-deception |
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
Acceptance | Consequences | Misfortune |
Paul Wellstone, fully Paul David Wellstone
We know what we need to do. We may not know all the answers, but we know enough of them that we have no excuse not to act. Too many focus on the difficulty of the problem merely as a means of evading responsibility.
Difficulty | Enough | Focus | Means | Need | Responsibility |
It will generally be found that men who are constantly lamenting their ill luck are only reaping the consequences of their own neglect, mismanagement, and improvidence, or want of application
Let's face it. Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you're attacked, but along, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man - war, poverty and tyranny - and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each.
Consequences | Dignity | Man | People | Poverty | Sense | Struggle | Truth | Tyranny | War |
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
Absurd | Action | Consequences | Mind | Morality |
The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions.
Ability | Absurd | Bitterness | Choice | Consequences | Giving | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nothing | God |
Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, and yet both actively working together.
Difficulty | People |
There are too many people praying for mountains of difficulty to be removed, when what they really need is courage to climb them.
Courage | Difficulty | Need | People |
Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think there are no little things.
Consequences | Little | Think |
He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice should go a little further, and try to plant a virtue in its place; otherwise he will have his labor to renew. A strong soil that has produced weeds may be made to produce wheat with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing.
Cost | Difficulty | Energy | Enough | Labor | Little | Nothing | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Vice |
There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quality that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the first, and Louis the Sixteenth, been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.
Circumstances | Danger | Difficulty | Man | Mediocrity | Wise | Yielding | Talent |