This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.
Conscience | Important | Object | Wisdom |
Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivises. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating.
Dreams | Fear | Hate | Liberty | Popularity | Wisdom | Learn |
Alice Thomas Ellis, nom de plume for Anna Haycraft, born Anna Margaret Lindholm
Those who live on vanity must, not unreasonably, expect to die of mortification.
Wisdom |
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 |
Of all our infirmities, vanity is the dearest to us; a man will starve his other vices to keep it alive.
He that acts unjustly is the worst rebel to himself; and though now ambition’s trumpet and drum of power may drown the sound, yet conscience with one day speak loudly to him.
Do your duty, and don’t swerve from it. Do that which your conscience tells you to be right, and leave the consequences to God.
Conscience | Consequences | Duty | God | Right | Wisdom |
Every pupil you have carries in his mind or heart or conscience a bit of you. Your influence, your example, your ideas and values keep marching on - how far into the future and into what realms of our spacious universe you will never know.
Conscience | Example | Future | Heart | Ideas | Influence | Mind | Universe | Will | Wisdom |
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.
Authority | Church | Conscience | Critic | Will | Wisdom | Zeal |
Roger Manwood, fully Sir Roger Manwood
As touching corporations, that they were invisible, immortal and that they had no soul, therefor no supoena lieth against them, because they have no conscience or soul.
Conscience | Soul | Wisdom |
André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog
Some truths between husband and wife must be spoken with sweetness. Wounded vanity is fatal to love. It makes one hate the person who inflicted the wound. In married conversation, as in surgery, the knife must be used with care.
Care | Conversation | Hate | Husband | Love | Wife | Wisdom | Truths |
More than any other organization in history, the U.N. symbolizes the collective conscience of mankind.
Conscience | History | Mankind | Organization | Wisdom |
Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.
Awareness | Conscience | Destiny | Difficulty | Isolation | Order | Rites | Silence | Solitude | Wisdom | Awareness |
Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
Three things we should keep in mind [in conversation]: first, that we speak in the presence of people as vain as ourselves, whose vanity suffers in proportion as ours is satisfied; second, that there are few truths important enough to justify paining and reproving others for not knowing them; finally, that any man who monopolizes the conversation is a fool or would be fortunate if he were one.
Conversation | Enough | Important | Justify | Knowing | Man | Mind | People | Wisdom | Truths |
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.
Age | Grave | Presumption | Wisdom |