This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It is a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment.
Accomplishment | Achievement | Man | Nothing | Wisdom | Obstacle |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.
Cause | Example | Mother | Truth | Wisdom | Witness | Instruction |
Midge Decter, fully Midge Rosenthal Decter
The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the... ecological chain of birthing, growing and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.
Children | Culture | Judgment | Society | Terror | Wisdom | Words | Youth | Society | Youth |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.
Achievement | Wisdom |
The devotion of thought to an honest achievement makes the achievement possible.
Achievement | Devotion | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Many adults draw childlike drawings and many children give up drawing at age nine or ten. These children grow up to become the adults who say they never could draw and can't even draw a straight line. The same adults, however, if questioned, often say that they would have liked to learn to draw well, just for their own satisfaction at solving the drawing problems that plagued them as children. But they felt that they had to stop drawing because they couldn't learn how to draw.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Courage | Defiance | Force | Foresight | Love | Self | Self-denial | Selfishness | Submission | Wisdom |
Joseph Farrell, fully Joseph Patrick Farrell
Take it for granted that the greater your achievement the more genuine will be the surprise of your friends and neighbors.
Achievement | Will | Wisdom | Friends |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
It has always seemed to me that ruthlessness and arrogant self-confidence constitute the indispensable condition for what, when it succeeds, strike us as greatness. And I also believe that one ought to differentiate between greatness of achievement and greatest of personality.
Achievement | Confidence | Greatness | Indispensable | Personality | Ruthlessness | Self | Self-confidence | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.
Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.
Aspiration | Will | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development as supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.
Achievement | Belief | Civilization | Existence | Faith | Illusion | Instinct | Perfection | Present | Wisdom | Work |
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.
Caution | Enjoyment | Life | Life | Means | Method | Need | Punishment | Wisdom |