This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth.
Edmond Cahn, fully Edmond Nathaniel Cahn
Freedom is not free. Shaping and preserving society necessarily involves personal commitment, costly risk and constant effort; the cultivation of civil liberty can be no more passive than the cultivation of a farm. A man can inherit the land on which he lives, he can even inherit the first crop of produce after he takes over from those who came before him. But then if he stops, everything stops, and begins to crumble. Nothing grows, nothing ripe and rewarding comes to him, unless he plows, plants and tends the soil and unless he keeps it fertile year after year with the chemistry of effort and forethought.
Commitment | Cultivation | Effort | Forethought | Freedom | Land | Liberty | Man | Nothing | Risk | Society | Wisdom | Society |
Charlie Chaplin, formally Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin
Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels.
Cyrus the Great, aka Cyrus the Elder, Cyrus II or Cyrus of Persia NULL
Soft climates breed soft men; the same soil never produces both delicacies and heroes.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
In sorrow seek happiness.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one ;unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy?
Courage | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Memory | Music | Past | Present | Resignation | Self | Sorrow | Soul | Sympathy | Tenderness | Weakness | Wisdom |
He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in the soil with strong mixture of troubles.
Calamity | Courage | Human nature | Love | Nature | Need | Troubles | Will | Wisdom | Calamity |
Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.
Decision | Indecision | Tears | Wisdom |
God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness; and laughter is on top of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Despair | God | Laughter | Madness | Mirth | Reason | Sorrow | Tears | Wisdom |
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open, this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude… The love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul.