This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"To bear up under loss; to fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; to be victor over anger, to smile when tears are close; to resist disease and evil men and base instincts; to hate hate and to love love; to go on when it would seem good to die; to look up with unquenchable faith in something ever more about to be - that is what any man can do, and be great." - Zane Grey Orig. name Pearl Grey
"Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs." - Moritz Güdemann
"If men would think more, they would act less." - Charles Montagu Halifax, 1st Earl of Halifax, Lord Halifax
"Men often mistake themselves, but they never forget themselves." - Charles Montagu Halifax, 1st Earl of Halifax, Lord Halifax
"All attempts to urge men forward, even in the right path, beyond the measure of their light, are impracticable; and unlawful, if they were practicable; augment their light, conciliate their affections, and they will follow of their own accord." - Robert Hall
"Corrupt as men are, they are yet so much the creatures of reflection, and so strongly addicted to sentiments of right and wrong, that their attachment to a public cause can rarely be secured, or their animosity be kept alive, unless their understandings are engaged by some appearance of truth and rectitude." - Robert Hall
"In all our reasonings concerning men we must lay it down as a maxim that the greater part are moulded by circumstances." - Robert Hall
"It has always struck me that there is a far greater distinction between man and man than between many men and most other animals." - Robert Hall
"Some men have a Sunday soul, which they screw on in due time, and take off again every Monday morning." - Robert Hall
"Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which Go has manifested to us." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
"Many men spend their lives gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
"Mountains never shake hands. Their roots may touch; they may keep together some way up; but at length they part company, and rise into individual, insulated peaks. So is it with great men." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
"Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than form principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
"The greatest truths are the simplest; and so are the greatest men." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
"No hell will frighten men away from sin; no dread of prospective misery; only goodness can cast hell out of any man, and set up the kingdom of heaven within." - Hugh Reginald Haweis
"Be charitable in your thoughts, in your speech and in your actions. Be charitable in your judgments, in your attitudes and in your prayers. Think charitably of your friends, your neighbors, your relatives and even your enemies. And if there be those whom you can help in a material way, do so in a quiet, friendly, neighborly way, as if it were the most command and everyday experience for you. Tongues of men and angels, gifts of prophecy and all mysteries and all knowledge are as nothing without charity." - Patrick Joseph Hayes
"The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions." - Heinrich Heine
"Whether a revolution succeeds or miscarries, men of great hearts will always be its victims." - Heinrich Heine
"Of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested; it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they; can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers." - Claude-Adrien Helvétius
"The men of sense, the idols of the shallow, are very inferior to the men of passions. It is the strong passions which, rescuing us from sloth, impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great attention." - Claude-Adrien Helvétius
"When a miser contents himself with giving nothing, and saving what he has got, and is in others respects guilty of no injustice, he is, perhaps, of all bad men the least injurious to society; the evil he does is properly nothing more than the omission of the good he might do. If, of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested, it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers." - Claude-Adrien Helvétius
""A Farewell To Arms"; that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"There can be no conquest to the man who dwells in the narrow and small environment of a groveling life, and there can be no vision to the man the horizon of whose vision is limited by the bounds of self. But the great things of the world, the great accomplishments of the world, have been achieved by men who had high ideals and who have received great visions. The path is not easy, the climbing is rugged and hard, but the glory at the end is worthwhile." - Matthew Henson. fully Matthew Alexander "Matt" Henson
"Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny." - John Oliver Hobbes, Pseud. for Mrs. Pearlmary-Teresa Craigie
"Belief and unbelief never follow men’s commands. Faith is a gift from God which man can neither give nor take away by promise of rewards or menaces of torture." - Thomas Hobbes
"Continual success in obtaining those things which a man form time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call felicity; I mean the felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense." - Thomas Hobbes
"For... what liberty is; there can no other proof be offered but every man’s own experience, by reflection on himself, and remembering what he useth in his mind, that is, what he himself meaneth when he saith an action... is free. Now he that reflecteth so on himself, cannot but be satisfied... that a free agent is he that can do if he will, and forbear if he will; and that liberty is the absence of external impediments. But to those that out of custom speak not what they conceive, but what they heard, and are not able, or will not take the pains to consider what they think when they hear such words, no argument can be sufficient, because experience and matter of fact are not verified by other men’s arguments, but by every man’s own sense and memory." - Thomas Hobbes
"Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind. God and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs and doctrines of men are different." - Thomas Hobbes
"To forgive sin is not an act of injustice, though the punishment have been threatened. Even amongst men, though the promise of good bind the promiser; yet threats, that is to say, promises of evil, bind them not; much less shall they bind God, who is infinitely more merciful than men." - Thomas Hobbes
"To this war of every man, against every man, this is also consequent that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice, and injustice, are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his sense, and passions. They are qualities, that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thing distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it." - Thomas Hobbes
"Whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth when he does think, opine, reason, hope, fear, etc., and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know what are the thoughts and passions of all men upon the like occasions." - Thomas Hobbes
"A nation is a thing that lives and acts like a man, and men are the particles of which it is composed." - Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
"As the very atoms of the earth and the stars of the sky seek harmony with the system which binds them in a cosmic unity, so the souls of men seek harmony with the Spirit which makes them one." - John Haynes Holmes
"The secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men whoever heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Men are guided less by conscience than by glory; and yet the shortest way to glory is to be guided by conscience." - Henry Home, Lord Kames
"The most unhappy of all men is he who believes himself to be so." - Henry Home, Lord Kames
"The glory of the nation rests in the character of her men. And character comes from boyhood. Thus every boy is a challenge to his elders." - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
"Good will, solidarity and wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today’s martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the after-life but the happiness of men who come after them for whom they know how to die." - Max Horkheimer
"There is a vigilance and judgment about trifles which men only get by living in a creed; and those are the trifles of detail, on which the success of execution depends." - Marina Horner
"All ills spring from some vice, either in ourselves or others; and even many of our diseases proceed from the same origin. Remove the vices, and the ills follow. You must only take care to remove all the vices. If you remove part, you may render the matter worse. By banishing vicious luxury, without curing sloth and an indifference to others, you only diminish industry in the state, and add nothing to men’s charity or their generosity." - David Hume
"It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions: the same events follow the same causes. Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit: these passions, mixed in various degrees, and distributed through society, have been from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all the actions and enterprises, which have ever been observed among mankind." - David Hume
"It seems evident, that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses; and that, without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe, which depends not on our perception, but would exist, though we and every sensible creature were absent or annihilated." - David Hume
"Men are not blamed for such actions as they perform ignorantly and casually, whatever may be the consequences. Why? but because the principles of these actions are only momentary, and terminate in them alone. Men are less blamed for such actions as they perform hastily and unpremeditatedly than for such as proceed from deliberation. For what reason? but because a hasty temper, though a constant cause or principle in the mind, operates only by intervals, and infects not the whole character. Again, repentance wipes off every crime, if attended with a reformation of life and manners. How is this to be accounted for? but by asserting that actions render a person criminal merely a they are proofs of criminal principles in the mind." - David Hume
"The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of deformity of vice, and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one and embrace the other. But is this ever to be expected from inferences and conclusions of the understanding, which of themselves have no hold of the affections, or set in motion the active powers of men? They discover truths: but where the truths which they discover are indifferent, and beget no desire or aversion, they can have no influence on conduct and behavior." - David Hume
"The most unhappy of all men is he who believes himself to be so." - David Hume