This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Anger an arrogance are partners. Inner feelings of conceit lead a person to become angry. Conversely, humility leads to forgiveness.
Anger | Arrogance | Character | Feelings | Forgiveness | Humility |
Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish water-proof to new ideas.
Ability | Curiosity | Humility | Ideas | Ignorance | Learning | Mind | Wisdom |
The more cruel the wrong that men commit against an individual or a people, the deeper their hatred and contempt for their victim. Conceit and false pride on the part of a nation prevent the rise of remorse for its crime.
Contempt | Crime | Individual | Men | People | Pride | Remorse | Wrong |
A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah, what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life.
What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
Of all the virtues, is not wisdom the one which the mass of mankind are always claiming, and which most arrouses in them a spirit of contention and lying conceit of wisdom?
Contention | Lying | Mankind | Spirit | Wisdom |
For the fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretended knowledge of the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?
Death | Evil | Fear | Good | Ignorance | Knowledge | Men | Wisdom |
The three kinds of vain conceit... the vain conceit of beauty, of wisdom, and of wealth, are ridiculous if they are weak, and detestable when they are powerful.
Talent is God-given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.
Fame |
You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
Danger | Good | Little | Need | Power | Will | Talent | Danger |
A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves. Neither vanity nor conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.
Distrust |
It is the young man of little faith who says, 'I am nothing.' It is the young man of true conception who says, 'I am everything,' and then goes to prove it. That does not spell conceit or egotism, and if people think it does, let them think so. Enough for us to know that it means faith, trust, confidence, the human expression of the God within us. He says. 'Do my work.' Go and do it. No matter what it is. Do it, but do it with a zest; a keenness; a gusto that surmounts obstacles and brushes aside discouragement.
Enough | Faith | God | Little | Man | Means | People | God | Think |
O man, no matter what you have studied or how much you have studied, do not follow the ways of your mind with conceit in your learning. Ask a man of wisdom who is on the path and follow his directions. If you do not meet a man of wisdom, lay your heart open and ask even a tree or a wall. The power of God within your heart called conscience will caution you and guide you. It will say, "Go," or "Don't go," "Right," or "Wrong." If your heart is open, your conscience will provide useful fruit which will benefit your journey through life.
Caution | Conscience | God | Heart | Journey | Man | Mind | Power | Will | Wisdom | God |
By now many intellectuals regard theoretical or 'objective' knowledge as the only knowledge worth considering. Popper himself encourages the belief by his slander of relativism. Now this conceit would have substance if scientists and philosophers looking for universal and objective morality had succeeded in finding the former and persuaded, rather than forced, dissenting cultures to adopt the latter. This is not the case.
Belief | Knowledge | Morality | Regard | Slander | Worth | Theoretical | Slander |
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
Forgetfulness | Means | Memory | Men | Will | Wisdom | Learn |
Some who are far from atheists, may make themselves merry with that conceit of thousands of spirits dancing at once upon a needle's point.
One reason we found the Chinese appeared to be so agreeable to deal with was their total lack of conceit or arrogance.
Reason |