This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
Sin with the multitude, and your responsibility and guilt are as great and as truly personal, as if you alone had done the wrong.
Guilt | Responsibility | Sin | Wisdom | Wrong |
There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science.
Children | Mathematics | Music | Passion | People | Wisdom |
It is certainly strange to observe... how many people seem to feel vain of their own unqualified optimism when the place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Equanimity | People | Wisdom |
Joseph Farrell, fully Joseph Patrick Farrell
Most people like praise. Many people have an unreasonable fear of administering it; it is part of the puritanical dislike for anything that is agreeable - to others. When it is really deserved, most people expand under it into richer and better selves.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit.
It is not marriage that fails: it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show people up.