This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
The honorary duty of a human being is to love.
For truth and duty it is ever the fitting time; who waits until circumstances completely favor his undertaking, will never accomplish anything.
Circumstances | Duty | Time | Truth | Will |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Respect for the freedom of others is the highest duty of man. To love this freedom and to serve it – such is the only virtue. That is the basis of all morality; and there can be no other.
Duty | Freedom | Love | Man | Morality | Respect | Virtue | Virtue |
Sentiment and nobility and love are immortal... Tenderness and loyalty, and patience, and self-sacrifice, and devotion to duty - these are life’s natural aspirations.
Devotion | Duty | Life | Life | Love | Loyalty | Loyalty | Nobility | Patience | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice | Sentiment | Tenderness |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
We should approach our nearest Problem or duty with concentrated energy and execute it to perfection. This should be our philosophy of life.
Duty | Energy | Life | Life | Perfection | Philosophy |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Life is worth nothing if it is not a continuous overcoming of problems. Each problem that waits for a solution at your hand is a religious duty imposed upon you by life itself. Any escape from problems, physical or mental, is an escape from life, as there can be no life that is not full of problems.
Fear guides more to their duty than gratitude; for one man who is virtuous from the love of virtue, from the obligation he thinks he lies under to the Giver of all, there are ten thousand who are good only from their apprehension of punishment.
Duty | Fear | Good | Gratitude | Love | Man | Obligation | Punishment | Virtue | Virtue |
[In the cave allegory] those whose who are destitute of philosophy may be compared to prisoners in a cave, who are only able to look in one direction because they are bound, and who have a fire behind them and a wall in front. Between them and the wall there is nothing; all that they see are shadows of themselves, and of objects behind them, cast on the wall by the light of the fire. Inevitably they regard these shadows as real, and have no notion of the objects to which they are due. At last some man succeeds in escaping from the cave to the light of the sun; for the first time he sees real things, and becomes aware that he had hitherto been deceived by shadows. If he is the sort of philosopher who is fit to become a guardian, he will feel it his duty to those who were formerly his fellow prisoners to go down again into the cave, instruct them as to the truth, and show them the way up. But he will have difficulty in persuading them, because, coming out of the sunlight, he will see shadows less clearly than they do, and will seem to them stupider than before his escape.
Difficulty | Duty | Light | Man | Nothing | Philosophy | Regard | Time | Truth | Will |
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Better | Distinction | Duty | Greatness | Man | Meanness | Opinion | People | Rule | Solitude | Will | World | Think |
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in his duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself, which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? The debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature?
Beauty | Debt | Duty | Folly | Genius | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Man | Mankind | Money | Nature | Thought | Wisdom | Beauty | Thought |
As a result of all his education, from everything he hears and sees around him, the child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be a healthy man is to disgorge it all.