This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Charisma is the ability to inspire followers with devotion and enthusiasm to a cause. It encourages disciples rather than independent persons. It is a way of investing oneself with authority over other rather than vesting others with authority over themselves.
Ability | Authority | Cause | Charisma | Devotion | Enthusiasm |
Doubt attracts “reasons” for not succeeding, whereas belief finds the means to do the job. Do not see yourself merely in terms of how you appear now. Absorbing the blows is a quality of greatness. Every big success is created one step at a time.
It’s easier to succeed because failure exacts a high price in terms of time when you have to do a job over. It’s easier to succeed because success eliminates the agony and frustration of defeat. It’s easier to succeed because money spent to fail must be spent again to succeed. It’s easier to succeed because a person’s credibility decreases with each failure, making it harder to succeed the second time. And it’s easier to succeed because joy and expressions of affirmation come from succeeding, whereas feelings of discouragement and discontent accompany failure.
Agony | Defeat | Discontent | Failure | Feelings | Joy | Money | Price | Success | Time | Failure |
Authentic success is knowing how simply abundant your life is exactly as it is today. Authentic success is being so grateful for the many blessings bestowed on you. Authentic success is living each day with a heart overflowing.
It is high time that the ideal of success should be replaced by the ideal of service.
Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
When a man dies, if he can pass enthusiasm along to his children, he has left them an estate of incalculable value.
Children | Enthusiasm | Man |
In the United States, there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success: He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner. In Puritan countries, success shows God’s benevolence. In Catholic countries, your God loves you only when you’ve suffered.
Benevolence | God | Good | Success | God |
If everyone is moving forward together, then success will take care of itself.
The fundamental principle of revolutionary wars: strike to win; strike only when success is certain; if not, then don’t strike.
Success |
I believe that our choice between two models of psychiatry is really a choice between two competing sets of moral values that will ultimately determine the kind of society we live in. One is the Psychotherapeutic Model’s ideal of healing the soul with its values of self-awareness, autonomy, personal growth, an I-Thou spirit of love, respect, and compassion for others, and an acceptance of moral responsibility for our own egoistic impulses and emotions. The other is the Medical Model’s ideal of quick fix, with its swimming-pool values of stability and conformity, and an I-It orientation toward material success and other superficial addictive pleasures
Acceptance | Awareness | Choice | Compassion | Conformity | Emotions | Growth | Love | Model | Respect | Responsibility | Self | Self-awareness | Society | Soul | Spirit | Success | Will | Society |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Heroes are made in the hour of defeat. Success is, therefore, well described as a series of glorious defeats.
Does your calculus of success include the bottom line of death, or are you mortgaging your future for the immediate and the short term? Have you been tranquilized by the trivial, or does your sense of life grow from a close attention to reality and time?
Attention | Death | Future | Life | Life | Reality | Sense | Success | Time |
Competition, the wringing of success from somebody’s failure.
Competition | Failure | Success |
Among the humble and great alike, those who achieve success do so not because fate and circumstance are especially kind to them. Often the reverse is true. They succeed because they do not whine over their fate but take whatever has been given to them and go on to make the most of their best.
Fate | Success | Fate | Circumstance |
When it is said and done, life’s journey isn’t about humanity in general, or even the person next door. It’s about you and me. Our individual lives are the focus, a picture framed by our birth and death. Our personal goals and principles are under scrutiny; our personal success or failure is in the balance.
Balance | Birth | Death | Failure | Focus | Goals | Humanity | Individual | Journey | Life | Life | Principles | Success | Failure |