This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A gentleman who had been very unhappy I marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.
Character | Experience | Hope | Marriage | Wife |
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
Whoever undertakes a long Journey, if he be wise, makes it his Business to find out an agreeable Companion. How cautious then should He be, who is to take a Journey for Life, whose Fellow-Traveler must not part with him but at the Grave; his Companion at Bed and Board and Sharer of all the Pleasures and Fatigues of his Journey; as the Wife must be to the Husband! She is no such Sort of Ware, that a Man can be rid of when he pleases: When once that’s purchas’d, no Exchange, no Sale, no Alienation can be made: She is an inseparable Accident to Man: Marriage is a Noose, which, fasten’d about the Neck, runs the closer, and fits more uneasy by our struggling to get loose: ‘Tis a Gordian Knot which none can unty, and being twisted with our Thread of Life, nothing but the Schyth of Death can cut it.
Accident | Alienation | Business | Character | Death | Grave | Husband | Journey | Life | Life | Man | Marriage | Nothing | Wife | Wise | Business |
A man’s Self is the sum-total of all that he can call his, not only his body, and his psychic powers, but this clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his land and horse and yacht and bank account.
Body | Character | Children | Land | Man | Reputation | Self | Wife |
How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls, a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one’s children rich.
Children | Generosity | Luxury | Selfishness | Wife | Wisdom | World |
If a man builds a better mousetrap than his neighbor, the world will not only beat a path to his door, it will make newsreels of him and his wife in beach pajamas, it will discuss his diet and his health, it will publish heart-throb stories of his love life.
Better | Diet | Health | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Man | Wife | Will | Wisdom | World |
André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog
Some truths between husband and wife must be spoken with sweetness. Wounded vanity is fatal to love. It makes one hate the person who inflicted the wound. In married conversation, as in surgery, the knife must be used with care.
Care | Conversation | Hate | Husband | Love | Wife | Wisdom | Truths |
George Lyttleton, 1st Baron Lyttleton of Frankley
How much the wife is dearer than the bride!
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley
I believe the recipe for happiness to be just enough money to pay the monthly bills you acquire, a little surplus to give you confidence, a little too much work each day, enthusiasm for your work, a substantial share of good health, a couple of real friends, and a wife and children to share life's beauty with you.
Beauty | Children | Confidence | Day | Enough | Enthusiasm | Good | Health | Life | Life | Little | Money | Surplus | Wife | Wisdom | Work | Beauty | Happiness |
To tell the truth, however, family and poverty have done more to support me than I have to support them. They have compelled me to make exertions that I hardly thought myself capable of; and often when on the eve of despairing, they have forced me, like a coward in a corner, to fight like a hero, not for myself, but for my wife and little ones.
Family | Hero | Little | Poverty | Thought | Truth | Wife | Wisdom | Thought |
We should behave toward our country as women do toward men they love. A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing and trying to improve him. We should cast the same affectionate but sharp glance at our country. We should love it, but also insist upon telling all its faults. The noisy empty "patriot" not the critic is the dangerous citizen.
A good wife is heaven’s last, best gift to man - his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels; her voice is sweet music, her smiles his brightest day, her kiss the guardian of his innocence, her arms the pale of his safety, her industry his surest wealth, her economy his safest steward, her lips his faithful counselors, her bosom the softest pillow of his care.
Care | Day | Good | Heaven | Industry | Innocence | Man | Music | Wealth | Wife | Wisdom |
Between man and wife friendship seems to exist by nature; for man is naturally inclined to form couples.
Man | Nature | Wife | Friendship |
Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat
Our fathers gave us many laws, which they had learned from their fathers. These laws were good. They told us to treat all people as they treated us; that we should never be the first to break a bargain; that it was a disgrace to tell a lie; that we should speak only the truth; that it was a shame for one man to take from another his wife or his property without paying for it. We were taught that the Great Spirit sees and hears everything, and that he never forgets, that hereafter he will give every man a spirit-home according to his deserts: If he has been a good man, he will have a good home; if he has been a bad man, he will have a bad home. This I believe, and all my people believe the same.
Disgrace | Good | Man | People | Property | Shame | Spirit | Truth | Wife | Will |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The relation of love between husband and wife is in itself not objective, because even if their feeling is their substantial unity, still this unity has no objectivity. Such objectivity parents first acquire in their children, in whom they can see objectified the entirety of their union.
Children | Husband | Love | Objectivity | Parents | Unity | Wife |