This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty; but an advantage in judgment we yield to none.
Beauty | Character | Courage | Enough | Experience | Judgment | Strength |
He who attempts to act and do things for others and for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give to others. He will communicate to them only the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, and his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.
Capacity | Character | Ego | Ends | Freedom | Ideas | Integrity | Love | Means | Self | Understanding | Will | World |
Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
The spirit of politeness is a desire to bring about by our words and manners, that others may be pleased with us and with themselves.
Character | Desire | Manners | Spirit | Words | Politeness |
Everyone in the world from the most successful to the least needs encouragement. Make it your career to give others encouragement.
We judge ourselves by our motives and others by their actions.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation.
Character | Despise | Enough | Evidence | Extreme | Good | Ignorance | Knowledge | Mother | Power | Stupidity | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wise | Value | Vice |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
There is still more intelligence needed to teach others than to be taught.
Character | Intelligence | Teach |
James Ridley, fully James Kenneth Ridley, wrote under pen name Sir Charles Morell
The first great gift we can bestow on others is a good example.
So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
Character | Mind | Peace | Reflection | Right | Self | Serenity | Will | Work |
Revelations are the aberration of faith; they are an amusement that spoils simplicity in relation to God, that embarrasses the soul and makes it swerve from its directness in relation to God. They distract the soul and occupy it with others than God.
Character | Faith | God | Simplicity | Soul |
Albert Paine, fully Albert Bigelow Paine
What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us. What we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.
To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we condemn in others, is neither better nor worse than to be more willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so.
To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.