This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Remove the chance to fail and we shall miss one of the best means of developing character.
While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision.
Action | Better | Consideration | Courage | Decision | Experience | Failure | Fear | Habit | Judgment | Man | Mind | Nothing | Position | Question | Responsibility | Right | Time | Will | Wisdom | Failure |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Grand is the seen, the light, to me - grand are the sky and stars, grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space, but grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those, lighting the slight, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing the sea, (what were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what amount without thee?) More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul! More multiform far - more lasting thou than they.
Elsa Yur'evna Triolet, Born Ella Kagan
Killing time or killing yourself amounts to the same thing, strictly speaking.
The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down to the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the common sense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.
Character | Common Sense | Light | Men | Morality | Nations | Proverbs | Sense | Time | Wise | Wit | Old |
Averroes, full name ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd NULL
A simple-minded believer would say, ‘God is in Heaven.’ A man of trained mind, knowing that God must be represented as a physical entity in space, would say, ‘God is everywhere, and not merely in Heaven.’ But if the omnipresence of God be taken only in a physical and spatial sense, that formula, too, is likely in error. Accordingly, the philosopher more adequately expresses the purely spiritual nature of God when he asserts that God is nowhere but in Himself; in fact, rather than say that God is in spaced he might more justly say that space and matter are in God.
Error | God | Heaven | Knowing | Man | Mind | Nature | Omnipresence | Sense | Space | Wisdom | God |
Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
Tomorrow comes to us untarnished by human living. No human eyes have seen it and no one can tell what it is going to be. The Chinese word for tomorrow (mingtien) means "bright day." There is the wisdom of sages and the rapture of the poets in that image.
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
If we conceive of some point of time which cannot be divided into even the minutes parts of moments, that is the only point that can be called present: and that point flees at such lightning speed from being future to being past, that it has no extent of duration at all.
They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.