This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The earth we live on is so small that even if someone was honored by everyone on our planet it is still insignificant. Also, a person’s lifetime is so short that even if he received honor and approval his entire life, it is so short in comparison with eternity. This is the ultimate success an approval-seeker can hope for, but the reality is that even if you spend you entire life trying to win the approval of others, only a small number of people will know and approve of you. The approval you do gain lasts a very short time and is soon forgotten as if it never was." - Bachya Ibn Pekudah
"Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. People grow old only by deserting their ideals and outgrowing the consciousness of youth. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. You are as old as your doubt; your fear; your despair. The way to keep young is to keep your faith young. Keep your self-confidence young. Keep your hope young." - Luella F. Phelan
"The beginning of all participation in good things is hope." - Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL
"The pinions of your soul will have power to still the untamed body. The creature will yield only to watchful, strenuous constancy of habit. Purify your soul from all undue hope and fear about earthly things, mortify the body, deny self - affections as well as appetites - and the inner eye will begin to exercise its clear and solemn vision." - Plotinus NULL
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast: man never is, but always to be blest: the soul, uneasy and confin’d from home, rests and expatiates n a life to come." - Alexander Pope
"Love, hope and joy, fair pleasure’s smiling train, hate fear and grief, the family of pain; these mix’d with art, and to due bounds confin’d, make and maintain the balance of the mind." - Alexander Pope
"The great comprehensive truths, written in letters of living light on every page of our history, are these: Human happiness has no perfect security but freedom; freedom, none but virtue; virtue, none but knowledge; and neither freedom nor virtue has any vigor or immortal hope except the principles of the Christian faith..." - James H. Aughey
"Man is at his best when stimulated by hope of reward, fear of failure, and the light of a star." - Erwin H. Schell
"Who dares nothing, need hope for nothing." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"Recreation is not being idle; it is easing the wearied part by change of occupation. To re-create strength, rest. To re-create mind, repose. To re-create cheerfulness, hope in God, or change the object of attention to one more elevated and worthy of thought." - Charles Simmons
"That charity alone endures which flows from a sense of duty and a hope in God. this is the charity that treads in secret those paths of misery from which all but the lowest of human wretches have fled; this is that charity which no labor can weary, no ingratitude detach, no horror disgust; that toils, that pardons, that suffers; that is seen by no man, and honored by no man, but, like the great laws of Nature, does the work of God in silence, and looks to a future and better world for its reward." - Sydney Smith
"To live, mankind must recover its essential humanness and its innate divinity; men must recover their capacity for humility, sanity and integrity; soldiers and civilians must see their hope in some other world than one completely dominated by the physical and chemical sciences." - George Stanley, fully George Francis Gillman Stanley
"Let us be very gentle with our neighbors’ failings, and forgive our friends their debts as we hope ourselves to be forgiven." - William Makepeace Thackeray
"The world is what we think it is. If we can change our thoughts, we can change the world. And that is our hope." - Henry Major Tomlinson
"We live by admiration, hope and love." - William Wordsworth
"One should seek virtue for its own sake and not from hope or fear, or any external motive. It is in virtue that happiness consists, for virtue is the state of mind which tends to make the whole of life harmonious." - Zeno of Citium NULL
"Virtue is worth seeking for its own sake, and not from hope or fear or any external motive." - Zeno of Citium NULL
"Every civilization rests on a set of promises... If the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes." - Herbert Sebastian Agar
"Few, without the hope of another life, would think it worth their while to live above the allurements of sense." - Francis Atterbury
"Hope robs men of understanding." - Bacchylides NULL
"It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant - birth, struggle, and death are constant - and so is love, though we may not always think so - and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths - change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not - safety, for example, or money or power. One clings then to chimeras, but which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope - the entire possibility - of freedom disappears." -
"Hope is the better half of courage. Hope has it not sustained the work, and given the fainting heart time and patience to outwit the chances and changes of life." - Honoré de Balzac
"Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you." - Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL
"A hope, if it is not big enough, can poison much more thoroughly than most despairs, for hope is more essentially an irritant than a soporific." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
"Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties. It is the cause of patience; gives endurance; overcome pain; strengthens weakness; braves dangers; sustains hope; make light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them." - John Christian Bovee
"There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God." - Phillips Brooks
"We hope to grow old, yet we fear old age; that is, we are willing to live, and afraid to die." - Jean de La Bruyère
"Hope nothing from luck, and probability is that you will be so prepared, forewarned, and forearmed, that all shallow observers will call you lucky." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Hope warps judgment in council, but quickens energy in action." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"In life, as in whist, hope nothing from the way cards may be dealt to you. Play the cards, whatever they be, to the best of your skill." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"The man who seeks one, and but one, thing in life may hope to achieve it; but he who seeks all things, wherever he goes, only reaps, from the hopes which he sows, a harvest of barren regrets." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"In prosperity prepare for a change; in adversity hope for one." - James Burgh
"All that I have accomplished, or expect or hope to accomplish, has been and will be by that plotting, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant heap, particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact." - Elihu Burritt
"The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." - Allan Chalmers, fully Allan Knight Chalmers
"Man's knowledge of science has clearly outstripped his knowledge of man. Our only hope of making the atom servant rather than master lies in education, in a broad liberal education where each student within his capacity can free himself from trammels of dogmatic prejudice and apply his educational accouterment to besetting social and human problems." - Harry Woodburn Chase
"Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"Hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
"Hope - of all ills that men endure, the only cheap and universal cure; the captive's freedom, and the sick man's health, the lover's victory, and the beggar's wealth." - Robert Crowley, also Robertus Croleus, Roberto Croleo, Robart Crowleye, Robarte Crole, and Crule
"Hope is a willing slave; despair is free." - Charles Gates Dawes
"That person lives in hell who gets what he desires too soon. Whether he finds his happiness in wealth, power, fame or women, or in a combination of all, that happiness will be meaningless if it robs him of his desire. Heaven is a country through which we are permitted to search eagerly and with hope for what we want." - Thomas Dreier
"The Bible is a window in this prison of hope, through which we look into eternity." - John Sullivan Dwight
"There is no moment like the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards; they will be dissipated, lost and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence." - Maria Edgeworth
"The time has come when we must hope our children and their children ad infinitum will want from life more than material success. They must have enough of that to ensure a roof, clothing, food and some recreation, but, if we are to survive for another two hundred years, we must change our way of life." - India Edwards