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 |
Active beneficence is a virtue of easier practice than forbearance after having conferred, or than thankfulness after having received a benefit. I know not, indeed, whether it be a greater and more difficult exercise of magnanimity for the one party to act as if he had forgotten, or for the other as if he constantly remembered the obligation.
Character | Forbearance | Magnanimity | Obligation | Practice | Thankfulness | Virtue | Virtue |
From a worldly point of view there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
As a great part of the uneasiness of matrimony arises from mere trifles, it would be wise in every young married man to enter into an agreement with his wife, that in all disputes of this kind the party who was most convinced they were right should always surrender the victory. By which means both would be more forward to give up the cause.
Cause | Character | Man | Matrimony | Means | Right | Surrender | Trifles | Wife | Wise |
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.
Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
Character | Good | Politics | Statesmanship | Wise |
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 |
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 |
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.