This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need. It performs some great service, not for itself, but for others or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Nothing will give permanent success in any enterprise of life, except native capacity cultivated by honest and persevering effort. Genius is often but the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.
Capacity | Discipline | Effort | Genius | Life | Life | Nothing | Success | Will | Wisdom |
A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks.
[There are] four destructive effects of religious and therapeutic disciplines: 1) A practice can reinforce limiting traits, preventing their removal or transformation. 2) A practice can support limiting beliefs, giving them greater power in the life of an individual or culture. 3) A practice can subvert balanced growth by emphasizing some virtues at the expense of others. 4) A practice can limit integral development when it focuses on partial though authentic experience of superordinary reality.
Culture | Experience | Giving | Growth | Individual | Life | Life | Power | Practice | Reality | Wisdom |
Jules Renard, aka Pierre-Jules Renard
Our tastes often improve at the expense of our happiness.
Wisdom |
Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of others. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality.
Ambition | Benevolence | Competition | Desire | Inequality | Jealousy | Men | Property | Rivalry | Security | Wisdom |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic.
Logic | Peace | Principles | Wisdom | Intellect |
The temptation of Protestantism has always been to magnify freedom at the expense of unity. The temptation of Roman Catholicism, on the other hand, has been to magnify unity at the expense of freedom.
Freedom | Temptation | Unity | Temptation |
Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions… The propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and, at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy.
W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester
She felt that those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.