This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We live by admiration, hope and love.
Admiration | Character | Hope | Love |
Robert C. Winthrop,fully Robert Charles Winthrop
Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise, - all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free.
Character | Dignity | Education | Ignorance | Justice | Slavery | Wisdom |
Every civilization rests on a set of promises... If the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.
Civilization | Faith | Hope | Wisdom |
Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"
There in fact four very significant stumbling-blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, long-standing custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge... there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience.
Authority | Custom | Display | Example | Experience | Ignorance | Knowledge | Man | Title | Truth | Wisdom |
There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
It is not wisdom but ignorance that teaches men presumption. Genius may sometimes be arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as knowledge.
Genius | Ignorance | Knowledge | Men | Nothing | Presumption | Wisdom |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
The man who seeks one, and but one, thing in life may hope to achieve it; but he who seeks all things, wherever he goes, only reaps, from the hopes which he sows, a harvest of barren regrets.
We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so.
Esteem | Misfortune | Poverty | Wisdom | World |
William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
A hope, if it is not big enough, can poison much more thoroughly than most despairs, for hope is more essentially an irritant than a soporific.
We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime.