This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You never really know your friends from your enemies until the ice breaks.
Friends |
Jim Webb, formally James Henry Webb, Jr.
Friends are found on the battlefield, and unfortunately friends are also lost. And where do we find the measure of that sacrifice? How can we account for the value of that loss? Sometimes we can find an answer in our sense of country, at other times in our Corps. But clearly we can see it in the lives that were able to continue due to the acts of others who were not so fortunate.
Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.
We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.
Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other's little failings.
Such is friendship, that through it we love places and seasons; for as bright bodies emit rays to a distance, and flowers drop their sweet leaves on the ground around them, so friends impart favor even to the places where they dwell. With friends even poverty is pleasant. Words cannot express the joy which a friend imparts; they only can know who have experienced. A friend is dearer than the light of heaven, for it would be better for us that the sun were exhausted than that we should be without friends.
Better | Friend | Joy | Light | Love | Poverty | Words | Friends |
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection.
John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
Never make excuses. Your friends don't need them and your foes won't believe them.
John Fowles, fully John Robert Fowles
I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope-- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.
Cynic | Cynicism | Day | Despise | Effort | Enough | Failure | Life | Life | Nothing | Truth | Failure | Friends |
In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends.
Friends |
John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
We can become great in the eyes of others, but we’ll never become successful when we compromise our character and show disloyalty toward friends or teammates. The reverse is also true: No individual or team will become great without loyalty.
Character | Disloyalty | Individual | Will | Friends |
The love of our private friends is the only preparatory exercise for the love of all men.
Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
Not only should we be unashamed of grief, confident that its expression will not permanently hurt us, but we should also possess the wisdom to talk about our loss and through that creative conversation with friends and companions begin to reconstruct the broken fragments of our lives... should not resist the sympathy and stimulation of social interaction. We should learn not to grow impatient with the slow healing process of time . . . We should anticipate these stages in our emotional convalescence: unbearable pain, poignant grief, empty days, resistance to consolation, disinterestedness in life, gradually giving way under the healing sunlight of love,friendship, social challange, to the new weaving of a pattern of action and the acceptance of the irresistible challenge of life.
Acceptance | Action | Challenge | Conversation | Giving | Sympathy | Time | Will | Wisdom | Loss | Friends | Learn |
Adolescents sometimes say..."My friends listen to me, but my parents only hear me talk." Often they are right. Familiarity breeds inattention.
Familiarity | Parents | Friends |
We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.
Lord Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.
Friends |
Marc Chagall, born Moishe Shagal
All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
Friends |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Your enemies can kill you, but only your friends can hurt you.