This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A man can stand being told that he must submit to a severe surgical operation, or that he has some disease which will shortly kill him, or that he will be a cripple or blind for the rest of his life; dreadful as such tidings must be, we do not find that they unnerve the greatest number of mankind; most men, indeed, go coolly enough even to be hanged, but the strongest quail before financial ruin, and the better men they are, the more complete, as a general rule, is their prostration.
Anyone who emerges in the midst of mankind as a herald who knows how to employ the gift of poetry to inspire the human mind with enthusiasm for all that is pure and true and godly, anyone who knows how to make man proud to be human and to enable him to recognize his God in every breath of his existence, anyone who can snatch man from the dust to have him stand upright in all his dignity and nobility, is, in the view of Judaism, a messenger of God on earth.
Culture | Danger | Education | Joy | Knowledge | Pleasure | Usefulness | Will | Danger |
Salvador de Madariaga, fully Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo
No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies.
We mourn over the sin which brought about that downfall (the Temple destruction -- author), we take to heart the harshness which we have encountered in our years of wandering as the chastisement of a father, imposed on us for our improvement, and we mourn the lack of observance of the Torah which that ruin has brought about. Not in order to shine as a nation among nations do we raise our prayers and hopes for a reunion in our land, but in order to find a soil for the better fulfillment of our spiritual vocation in that reunion and in that land which was promised, and given, and again promised for our observance of the Torah. But this very vocation obliges us, until G-d shall call us back to the Holy Land, to live and to work as patriots wherever He has placed us, to collect all the physical, material and spiritual forces and all that is noble in Israel to further the weal of the nations which have given us shelter. It obliges us, further, to allow our longing for the far-off land to express itself only in mourning, in wishing and hoping; and only through the honest fulfillment of all Jewish duties to await the realization of this hope. But it forbids us to strive for the reunion or possession of the land by any but spiritual means.
Aims | Childhood | Children | Dawn | Experience | Joy | Knowledge | Life | Life | Light | Philosophy | Self-interest | Will | Wisdom | Yearnings | Youth | Youth |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Matter has no reality apart from its form, for the real derives from form, and therefore matter moves toward the reception of form, in other words, to be released from the sorrow of absence to the pleasure of existence.
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Jealousy is cruel as the grave the coals thereof are coals of fire.
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
The industrial field is littered with more corpses of organizations destroyed by the damning influences of partisan politics than from all other causes combined.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
But, perhaps, the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in few words.
There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.
Doubt | Knowledge | Labor | Opportunity | Truth |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Books (says Bacon) can never teach the use of books; the student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice. No man should think so highly of himself as to suppose he can receive but little light from books, nor so meanly as to believe he can discover nothing but what is to be learned from them.
Falsehood | Gold | Knowledge | Little | Man | Truth | Will |