This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Love, like fire, cannot subsist without constant impulse; it ceases to live from the moment it ceases to hope or to fear." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear and hope will forward it; and they who persist in opposing this mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be so much resolute and firm as perverse and obstinate." - Edmund Burke
"Three were the fates, - gaunt poverty that chains, gray drudgery that grinds the hope away, and gaping ignorance that starves the soul." - Edwin Markham
"Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"A great Hope fell. You heard no noise. The Ruin was within." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"The most universal thing is hope, for hope stays with those who have nothing else." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"Not actual suffering but the hope of better things incites people to revolt." - Eric Hoffer
"To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life. A grievance can almost serve as a substitute for hope; and it not infrequently happens that those who hunger for hope give their allegiance to him who offers them a grievance." - Eric Hoffer
"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
"It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate." - Eric Hoffer
"Hope is a stance, not an assessment." - Frances Moore Lappé
"A man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others; for men's minds will either feed upon their own good, or upon others' evil; and who wanteth the one will prey upon the other; and whoso is out of hope to attain to another's virtue, will seek to come at even hand by depressing another's fortune." - Francis Bacon
"Hope is the most beneficial of all the affections, and doth much to the prolongation of life, if it be not too often frustrated; but entertaineth the fancy with expectation of good." - Francis Bacon
"Prosperity is not without fears and distaste; and adversity is not without comforts and hope." - Francis Bacon
"The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty." - Franz Kafka
"In Hell there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, being a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself, is the paradise of the worthless." - George Bernard Shaw
"The notion that there is and can be but one time, and that half of it is always intrinsically past and the other half always intrinsically future, belongs to the normal pathology of an animal mind: it marks the egoistical outlook of an active being endowed with imagination. Such a being will project the moral contrast produced by his momentary absorption in action upon the conditions and history of that action, and upon the universe at large. A perspective of hope and one of reminiscence divide for him a specious eternity; and for him the dramatic centre of existence, though always a different point in physical time, will always be precisely in himself." - George Santayana
"To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be." - George Santayana
"Sentimental time is a genuine, if poetical, version of the march of existence, even as pictorial space is a genuine, if poetical version of its distribution... the least sentimental term in sentimental time is the term now, because it marks the junction of fancy with action... For it is evident that actual succession can contain nothing but nows, so that now in a certain way is immortal. But this immortality is only a continual reiteration, a series of moments each without self-possession and without assurance of any other moment; so that if ever the now loses its indicative practical force and becomes introspective, it becomes acutely sentimental, a perpetual hope unrealized and a perpetual dying." - George Santayana
"Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions." - George Santayana
"I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an “honest man.”" - George Washington
"As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality." - George Washington
"Where there is no vision, there is no hope." - George Washington Carver
"A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread." - Georges Bernanos
"Love is born of faith, lives on hope, and dies of charity." - Gian-Carlo Menotti
"Faith has to do with the basis, the ground on which we stand. Hope is reaching out for something to come. Love is just being there and acting." - Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
"Hope... is one of the ways in which what is merely future and potential is made vividly present and actual to us. Hope is the positive, as anxiety is the negative, mode of awaiting the future." - Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
"One grain of instant life is equivalent to acres of the leaf of hope hammered out to gild our prospect." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Until we lose ourselves, there is no hope of finding ourselves." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Let me but live from year to year, with forward face and unreluctant soul; not hurrying to, nor turning from, the goal; not mourning for the things that disappear in the dim past, nor holding back in fear from what the future veils; but with a whole and happy heart, that pays its toll to Youth and Age, and travels with cheer. So let the way wind up the hill or down o’er rough and smooth, the journey will be joy: still seeking what I sought when but a boy, new friendship, high adventure, and a crown, my heart will keep the courage of the quest, and hope the road’s last turn will be the best." - Henry Van Dyke
"The little I have seen of the world, teaches me to look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger. When I take the history of one poor heart that has sinned and suffered, and represent to myself the struggles and temptations it has passed through, the brief pulsations of joy, the feverish inquietude of hope and fear, the pressure of want, the desertion of friends, I would fain leave the erring soul of my fellowman with Him from whose hand it came." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Happy is the man who has that in his soul which acts upon the dejected as April airs upon violet roots. Gifts from the hand are silver and gold, but the heart gives that which neither silver nor gold can buy. To be full of goodness, full of cheerfulness, full of sympathy, full of helpful hope, causes a man to carry blessings of which he is himself as unconscious as a lamp is of its own shining. Such a one moves on human life as stars move on dark seas to bewildered mariners; as the sun wheels, bringing all the season with him from the south." - Henry Ward Beecher
"God planted fear in the soul as truly as he planted hope and courage. It is a kind of bell or gong which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance on the approach of danger. It is the soul's signal for rallying." - Henry Ward Beecher
"God planted fear in the soul as truly as He planted hope or courage. Fear is a kind of bell, or gong, which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger. It is the soul’s signal for rallying." - Henry Ward Beecher
"To lose money is nothing, but to lose hope, to lose nerve, to lose ambition - that makes men cripples." - Herbert Newton Casson
"It is plain that the hope of a future life arises from the feeling, which exists in the breast of every man, that the temporal is inadequate to meet and satisfy the demands of his nature." - Immanuel Kant
"My question is, what can we hope to achieve with reason, when all the material and assistance of experience are taken away?" - Immanuel Kant
"The purpose of life is to believe, to hope, and to strive." - Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
"Never hope to conceal any shameful thing which you have done; for even if you do conceal it from others, your own heart will know." - Isocrates NULL
"Hope is a word like a snowdrift - This is the Great Knowing, this is the Awakening, this is Voidness - So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry." - Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac
"The world’s history is a divine poem of which the history of every nation is a canto and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian - the humble listener - there has been a divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come." - James A. Garfield
"When young, we trust ourselves too much and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute." - James Bryant Conant
"A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea." - John Ciardi, fully John Anthony Ciardi
"Where the mind is past hope, the heart is past shame." - John Lyly or Lilly or Lylie
"Where no hope is left, is left no fear." - John Milton
"There are three material things, not only useful, but essential to life. No one “knows how to live” till he has got them. These are pure air, water and earth. There are three immaterial things, not only useful, but essential to life. No one knows how to live till he has got them also. These are admiration, hope and love. Admiration - the power of discerning and taking delight in what is beautiful in visible form and lovely in human character; and, necessarily, striving to produce what is beautiful in form and to become what is lovely in character. Hope - the recognition, by true foresight, of better things to be reached hereafter, whether by ourselves or others; necessarily issuing in the straightforward and undisappointable effort to advance, according to our proper power, the gaining of them. Love - both of family and neighbor, faithful and satisfied." - John Ruskin
"No day is without its innocent hope." - John Ruskin
"There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality." - Jonas Salk