This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
Give us grace and strength to forbear and to preserve. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends and soften to us our enemies. Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.
Character | Courage | Death | Fortune | Grace | Mind | Peril | Quiet | Strength | Friends |
If men knew what felicity dwells in the cottage of a godly man, how sound he sleeps, how quiet his rest, how composed his mind, how free from care, how easy his position, how moist his mouth, how joyful his heart, they would never admire the noises, the diseases, the throngs of passions, and the violence of unnatural appetites that fill the house of the luxurious and the heart of the ambitious.
Care | Character | Heart | Man | Men | Mind | Position | Quiet | Rest | Sound |
Francis Walsingham, fully Sir Francis Walsingham
Every virtue gives a man a degree of felicity in some kind: honesty gives a man a good report; justice, estimation; prudence, respect; courtesy and liberality, affection; temperance gives health; fortitude, a quiet mind, not to be moved by any adversity.
Adversity | Character | Courtesy | Estimation | Fortitude | Good | Health | Honesty | Justice | Man | Mind | Prudence | Prudence | Quiet | Respect | Virtue | Virtue |
Spend your time in nothing which you know must be repented of; in nothing on which you might not pray for the blessing of God; in nothing which you could not review with a quiet conscience on your dying bed; in nothing which you might not safely and properly be found doing if death should surprise you in the act.
Conscience | Death | God | Nothing | Quiet | Time | Wisdom |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Evening is the delight of virtuous age; it seems an emblem of the tranquil close of busy life - serene, placid, and mild, with the impress of its great Creator stamped upon it; it spreads its quiet wings over the grave, and seems to promise that all shall be peace beyond it.
Age | Grave | Life | Life | Peace | Promise | Quiet | Wisdom |
To keep from gravitating toward genocidal conflict, we must stop demanding perpetual progress. For quiet nonpolitical reasons, governments and politicians cannot achieve the paradise they habitually promise. Political leaders who continue to dangle before their constituents enticing carrots that are becoming unattainable hasten the erosion of faith in political processes. Circumstances have ceased to be what they were when the once-New World’s myth of limitlessness made sense.
Circumstances | Faith | Myth | Paradise | Progress | Promise | Quiet | Sense | Wisdom | World |
Edward Coke, fully Sir Edward Coke
The house of every man is his castle, and if thieves come to a man’s house to rob or murder, and the owner or his servants kill any of the thieves in defense of himself and his house, it is no felony and he lose nothing.
Miles Coverdale, also Myles Coverdale
A quiet heart is a continual feast.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quiet apart form any fluctuations that went before - consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.
Consequences | Deeds | Quiet | Wisdom | Deeds |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity form the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!”
Beginning | Dispute | Humanity | Kill | Man | Men | Nothing | Time | Will | Wisdom | Worship |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.
Defects | Imperfection | Quiet | Wisdom |
Next to temperance, a quiet conscience, a cheerful mind, and active habits, I place early rising as a means of health and happiness.