This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor." - Aristotle NULL
"Everyone can make a claim to honor; very few to fame, as being attainable only in virtue of extraordinary achievements." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Study from love, and honor will follow." - Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda NULL
"A man of honor should never forget what he is because he sees what others are." - Baltasar Gracián
"Prestige involves at least two persons: one to claim it and another to honor the claim… In the status system of a society these claims are organized as rules and expectations which regulate who successfully claims prestige, from whom, in what ways, and on what basis. The level of self-esteem enjoyed by given individuals is more or less set by this status system." -
"Honor is unstable, and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food. She builds a lofty structure on the sandy foundation of the esteem of those who of all beings the most subject to change." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Honor is the most capricious in her rewards. She feeds us with air, and often pulls down our house, to build our monument." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Did it ever strike you that goodness is not merely a beautiful thing, but by far the most beautiful thing in the whole world? So that nothing is to be compared for value with goodness; that riches, honor, power, pleasure, learning, the whole world and all in it, are not worth having in comparison with being good; and the utterly best thing for a person is to be good, even though they were never to be rewarded for it." -
"There are two kinds of constancy in love, one arising from incessantly finding in the loved one fresh objects to love, the other from regarding it as a point of honor to be constant." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"God sells knowledge for labor, honor for risk." - Dutch Proverbs
"Society considers the sex experiences of a man as attributes of his general development, while similar experiences in the life of a woman are looked upon as a terrible calamity, a loss of honor and of all that is good an noble in a human being." - Emma Goldman
"The beginning and the greatest good is prudence. Wherefore prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy; for from prudence are spring all the other virtues, and it teaches us that it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly, nor, again, to live a life of prudence, honor and justice without living pleasantly. For the virtues are by nature bound up with the pleasant life, and the pleasant life is inseparable from them." - Epicurus NULL
"In the alchemy of man’s soul almost all noble attributes - courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless." - Eric Hoffer
"Men fear death, as children fear the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by frightful tales, so is the other. Groans, convulsions, weeping friends, and the like show death terrible; yet there is no passion so weak but conquers the fear of it, and therefore death is not such a terrible enemy. Revenge triumphs over death, loves slights its, honor aspires to it, dread of shame prefers it, grief flies to it, and fear anticipates it." - Francis Bacon
"Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons." - George Bernard Shaw
"Honor and profit lie not in one sack." - George Herbert
"Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all." - George Santayana
"Wealth lost, something lost; honor lost, much lost; courage lost, all lost." - German Proverbs
"Where there's no modesty there's no honor." - German Proverbs
"It is not by reason, but most often in spite of it, that area created those sentiments that are the mainsprings of all civilization – sentiments such as honor, self-sacrifice, religious faith, patriotism, and the love of glory." - Gustave Le Bon
"He who wins honor through his neighbor’s shame will never reach Paradise." - Hebrew Proverbs
"Good-nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor, to the persons who possess it, and certainly to everybody who dwells with them, in so far as mere happiness is concerned." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Good nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor, to the persons who possess it." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Only a few rare souls in a century, to whose class I make no pretension, count much in the great flow of this Republic. The life stream of this nation is the generations of millions of human particles acting under the impulses of advancing ideas and national ideals gathered from a thousand springs... We are but transitory officials in government whose duty is to keep these channels clear and to strengthen and extend these dikes. What counts toward the honor of public officials is that they sustain the national ideals upon which are patterned the design of these channels of progress and the construction of these dikes of safety." -
"Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard. We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings. A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much." - Homer NULL
"As unkindness has no remedy at law, let its avoidance be with you a point of honor." - Hosea Ballou
"Men can never acquire respect by benevolence alone, though they may gain love, so that the greatest beneficence only procures them honor when it is regulated by worthiness." - Immanuel Kant
"Among men of honor, a word is a bond." - Italian Proverbs
"A warrior deems life a light thing when compared to honor." - Japanese Proverbs
"One can recover from loss of wealth, and even loss of health, but never the loss of honor." - John A. Marshall, fully John Aloysius Marshall
"To make the people fittest to choose, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education , to teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, modesty, sobriety, parsimony, justice; not to admire wealth or honor; to hate turbulence and ambition; to place every one his private welfare and happiness in the public peace, liberty and safety." - John Milton
"There is nothing so small but that we may honor God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands; and what is true of the Deity is equally true of His revelation." - John Ruskin
"In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong; honor that; try to imitate it, and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes." - John Ruskin
"You cannot imitate somebody else’s journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness?" - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"He who would pass the declining years of his life with honor and comfort, should when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young." - Joseph Addison
"Honor's a sacred tie, the noble mind's distinguish perfection, that aids and strengthens virtue where it meets her, and imitates her actions where she is not." - Joseph Addison
"“What is your religion?” Bravely I stated, “I believe in God and I honor His prophets; I love virtue and I have faith in eternity.”" - Kahlil Gibran
"Do not expect good counsel from a tyrant, or a wrong-doer, or a presumptuous man, or a deserter from honor." - Kahlil Gibran
"No man loses honor who had any in the first place." - Latin Proverbs
"Who sows virtue reaps honor." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
"Great talents, such as honor, virtue, learning, and parts, are above the generality of the world, who neither possess them themselves, nor judge of them rightly in others; but all people are judges of the lesser talents, such as civility, affability, and an obliging, agreeable address and manner, because they feel the good effects of them, as making society easy and pleasing." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"My parents never bound us to any church but taught us that the love of goodness was the love of God, the cheerful doing of duty made life happy, and that the love of one’s neighbor in its widest sense was the best help for oneself. Their lives showed us how lovely this simple faith was, how much honor, gratitude and affection it brought them, and what a sweet memory they left behind." - Louisa May Alcott
"Honors are easier had than honor." - Malcolm S. Forbes, fully Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Sr.
"Honor is the reward of virtue." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Ability without honor is useless." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Our capacity to reason and our freedom to choose make us morally autonomous and, therefore, answerable for whether we honor or degrade the ethical principles that give life meaning and purpose." - Michael S. Josephson