This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.
Character | Individuality | Man |
Get to know two things about a man - how he earns his money and how he spends it - and you have a clue to his character, for you have a searchlight that shows up the inmost recesses of his soul. You know all you need to know about his standards, his motives, his driving desires, his real religion.
Character | Man | Money | Motives | Need | Religion | Soul |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
A wise man is not wise in everything.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
What more wretched than the man who is the slave of his own imaginings?
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
No young man is educated if he comes out of college with the cheap and false values of the common man.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
A man must not always tell the whole truth.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
How can a man live free? By despising death.
The office of the moral law is that of a pedagogue, to protect and educate us in the use of freedom. At the end of this period of instruction, we are enfranchised from every servitude, even from the servitude of law, since Love made us one in spirit with the wisdom that is the source of Law.
Character | Freedom | Law | Love | Moral law | Office | Servitude | Spirit | Wisdom |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
As soon as a woman is no longer ours, we are no longer theirs.
Vices are often hid under the name of virtue, and the practice of them followed by the worst consequences. I have seen ladies indulge their own ill-humor by being very rude and impertinent, and think they deserve approbation by saying, “I love to speak the truth.”
Character | Consequences | Humor | Love | Practice | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Think |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Greatness of soul is not so much mounting high and pressing forward, as knowing how to put oneself in order and circumscribe oneself. It regards as great all that is enough and shows its elevation by preferring moderate things to eminent ones. There is nothing so beautiful and just as to play the man well and fitly, nor any knowledge so arduous as to know how to live this life well and naturally; and of all our maladies the most barbarous is to despise our being.
Character | Despise | Enough | Greatness | Knowing | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Order | Play | Soul |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which [we least know]a man knoweth least.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what ever man persuades another man to believe.
Arundell Charles St. John-Mildmay
Every duty brings its peculiar delight, every denial its appropriate compensation, every thought its recompense, every love its elysium, every cross its crown; pay goes with performance as effect with cause. Meanness overreaches itself; vice vitiates whoever indulges it; the wicked wrong their own souls; generosity greatens; virtue exalts; charity transfigures; and holiness is the essence of angelhood. God does not require us to live on credit; he pays us what we earn as we earn it, good or evil, heaven or hell, according to our choice.
Cause | Character | Charity | Choice | Compensation | Credit | Duty | Evil | Generosity | God | Good | Heaven | Hell | Love | Meanness | Recompense | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wrong | God | Thought | Vice |