This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is certainly strange to observe... how many people seem to feel vain of their own unqualified optimism when the place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Equanimity | People | Wisdom |
Joseph Farrell, fully Joseph Patrick Farrell
Most people like praise. Many people have an unreasonable fear of administering it; it is part of the puritanical dislike for anything that is agreeable - to others. When it is really deserved, most people expand under it into richer and better selves.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit.
It is not marriage that fails: it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show people up.
The happiest people are those who are too busy to notice whether they are or not.
Formerly, people believed that the sugar cane alone yielded sugar; nowadays it is extracted from almost anything. It is the same with poetry. Let us draw it, no matter whence, for it lies everywhere, and in all things.
It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.
Observation | People | Time | Waste | Wisdom |
The majority of people are naturally straddlers. They are not in the world to pioneer but to be as happy as possible. If pioneering in a cause brings discomfort, they would rather not be among the pioneers. they would rather stand on the sidelines and, in the combat between truth and error, wait and see which proves the stronger. Though they may have a lazy faith that truth at last will win, they do not wish to lend a premature support.
Cause | Error | Faith | Happy | Majority | People | Truth | Will | Wisdom | World |
Beneath a free government there is nothing but the intelligence of the people to keep the people’s peace. Order must be preserved, not by a military police or regiments of horse-guards, but by the spontaneous concert of a well-informed population, resolved that the rights which have been rescued from despotism shall not be subverted by anarchy.
Anarchy | Government | Intelligence | Nothing | Order | Peace | People | Rights | Wisdom | Government |