This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Shlomo Wolbe, aka Wilhelm Wolbe
When you have desires to do something wrong, you might feel so embarrassed with yourself for not being on a higher level that you try to repress those desires and forget about them. This is a mistake since it is not dealing with the problem but covering it up. Ignoring your inner feelings and reactions is dangerous. Be aware of what you desire, and have a dialogue with yourself to overcome it.
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.
Art | Cause | Character | Difficulty | Good | Men | Mistake | Thinking | Virtue | Virtue | Art |
From a worldly point of view there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
There is no real elevation of mind in a contempt of little things; it is, on the contrary, from too narrow views that we consider those things of little importance which have in fact such extensive consequences.
Character | Consequences | Contempt | Little | Mind |
Charles Montagu Halifax, 1st Earl of Halifax, Lord Halifax
Men often mistake themselves, but they never forget themselves.
In judging character, too often we mistake rigidity for morality.
Yeruchem Levovitz, aka The Mashgiach
When unable to fulfill a specific desire, we tend to exaggerate its importance for our happiness... Become aware of your tendency to consider something more important than it really is when you lack it.
Madmen... do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles. For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.
Character | Ideas | Men | Mistake | Principles | Right | Wrong |
He who gives himself airs of importance exhibits the credentials of impotence.
It is undoubtedly true that some people mistake sycophancy for good nature, but it is equally true that man more mistake impertinence for sincerity.
Character | Good nature | Good | Impertinence | Man | Mistake | Nature | People | Sincerity |
It is a mistake to base one’s hopes for happiness upon the enforcement of security and equality. In principle, both desires are insatiable... No individual or society is secure in a world of emergent probability and sin... To exercise liberty is to take risks, to embrace uncertainties.
Character | Equality | Individual | Liberty | Mistake | Security | Sin | Society | World | Society | Happiness |
Reason itself... demands that we recognize the limited place of the virtues of cognition, inquiry, and the cerebral side of life. An adequate account of rationality must rightly stress its importance and primacy while recognizing that the intellectual virtues are only limited components of the good life.
Character | Good | Inquiry | Life | Life | Rationality | Reason |
W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross
It would be a mistake to found a natural science on ‘what we really think’ ... opinions are interpretations, and often misinterpretations, of sense-experience; and the man of science must appeal from these to sense-experience itself, which furnishes his real data. In ethics no such appeal is possible... the moral convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people are the data of ethics just as sense-perceptions are the data of a natural science.
Character | Convictions | Ethics | Experience | Man | Mistake | People | Science | Sense |
The one and only serious mistake is to be afraid of making mistakes.