This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.
Benevolence | Fraud | Good | Knowledge | Little | Mankind | Wisdom | World | Friendship | Forgive | Learn |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle at the onset.
Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
The basic discovery bout any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and women.
Discovery | Men | People | Relationship | Wisdom | Discovery |
The first step to knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.
An accession of wealth is a dangerous predicament for a man. At first he is stunned, if the accession be sudden; he is very humble and very grateful. Then he begins to speak a little louder; people think him more sensible, and soon he thinks himself so.
I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, and receives new truth as an angel for Heaven.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom - from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?
Fate | Heaven | Ignorance | Knowledge | Order | Wisdom | Fate |
Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury
As accession of wealth is a dangerous predicament for a man. At first he is stunned if the accession be sudden, and is very humble and very grateful. Then he begins to speak a little louder, people think him more sensible, and soon he think himself so.
All that man does outwardly is but the expression and completion of his inward thought. To work effectually, he must think clearly; to act nobly, he must think nobly. Intellectual force is a principal element of the soul's life, and should be proposed by every man as the principal end of his being.
Force | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Thought | Wisdom | Work | Think |
Man's knowledge of science has clearly outstripped his knowledge of man. Our only hope of making the atom servant rather than master lies in education, in a broad liberal education where each student within his capacity can free himself from trammels of dogmatic prejudice and apply his educational accouterment to besetting social and human problems.
Capacity | Education | Hope | Knowledge | Man | Prejudice | Problems | Science | Wisdom |
Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury
Examples is more forcible than precept. People look at my six days in the week to see what I mean on the seventh.
There is no use whatever trying to help people who do not help themselves. You cannot push anyone up a ladder unless he is willing to climb himself.
You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly central and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self. Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never lose.
Cost | Life | Life | Need | People | Relationship | Self | Will | Wisdom |