This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The wrinkles of the heart are more indelible than those of the brow.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
It is in those acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look around with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness, calling their denial knowledge.
Everyone suffers. But many do not take it to heart that the suffering comes as a punishment for transgressions, rather they consider it accidental. The proper attitude is that suffering is an atonement. With this realization a person appreciates that suffering in this world saves him suffering in the next.
Character | Heart | Punishment | Suffering | World |
Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen
The mind is no match with the heart in persuasion; constitutionality is no match with compassion.
Character | Compassion | Heart | Mind | Persuasion |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
On this earth all is temptation. Crosses tempt us by irritating our pride, and prosperity by flattering it. Our life is a continual combat... We must pass on unmoved, while temptations rage around us, as the traveler, overtaken by a storm, simply wraps his cloak more closely about him, and pushes on more vigorously toward his destined home.
Character | Earth | Life | Life | Pride | Prosperity | Rage | Temptation |
There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.
Pain and pleasure, good and evil, come to us from unexpected sources. It is not there where we have gathered up our brightest hopes, that the dawn of happiness breaks. It is not there where we have glanced our eye with affright, that we find the deadliest gloom. What should this teach use? To bow to the great and only Source of light, and live humbly and with confiding resignation.
Character | Dawn | Evil | Gloom | Good | Light | Pain | Pleasure | Resignation | Teach | Happiness |
Of all the animals on earth, man has shown himself to be the most cruel and brutal. He is the only animal that will create instruments of death for his own destruction. Man is the only animal on all the earth that has ever been known to burn its young as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of some imaginary deity. He is the only one that will build homes, towns, and cities at such a cost in sacrifice and suffering and turn around and destroy them in war.
Character | Cost | Death | Destroy | Earth | Man | Sacrifice | Suffering | War | Will |
Only the heart without a stain knows perfect ease.
Since Time is not a person we can overtake when he is gone, let us honor him with mirth and cheerfulness of heart while he is passing.
It is a dangerous crisis, when a proud heart meets with flattering lips.
He is well along the road to perfect manhood who does not allow the thousand little worries of life to embitter his temper, or disturb his equanimity. An undivided heart which worships God alone, and trust him as it should, is raised above anxiety for earthly wants.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Character | Equanimity | God | Heart | Life | Life | Little | Temper | Trust | Wants | God |
T. L. Fine, fully Terrence L. Fine
Too keen an eye for pattern will find it anywhere.
Dizzy Gillespie, born John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie
The idea of life is to give and receive, and if you didn’t have anybody on earth to give to or receive from, then you’d have a very sad life... One of the reasons we’re here is to be part of this process of exchange.