This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love with which God loves Himself... Hence it follows that God, in so far as He loves Himself, loves men, and consequently that the love of God towards men and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are one and the same thing." -
"Passion is the great mover and spring of the soul: when men's passions are strongest, they may have great and noble effects; but they are then also apt to fall into the greatest miscarriages." - Thomas Sprat
"Self-denial is the result of a calm, deliberate, invincible attachment to the highest good, flowing forth in the voluntary renunciation of everything inconsistent with the glory of God or the good of our fellow-men." - Gardiner Spring
"Progress is always the product of fresh thinking, and much of it thinking which to practical men bears the semblance of dreaming." - Robert Gordon Sproul
"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
"Men spend their lives in the service of their passions, instead of employing their passions in the service of their life." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
"The world will never be in any manner of order or tranquillity until men are firmly convinced that conscience, honor and credit are all in one interest; and that without he concurrence of the former the latter are but impositions upon ourselves and others." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
"These men (chronic fault-finders) should consider that it is their envy which deforms everything, and that the ugliness is not in the object, but in the eye." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
"Vanity makes men ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
"It is taught that willing and voluntary service to others is the highest duty and glory in human life... The men of talent are constantly forced to serve the rest. They make the discoveries and inventions, order the battles, write the books, and produce the works of art. The benefit and enjoyment go to the whole. There are those who joyfully order their own lives so that they may serve the welfare of mankind." - William Graham Sumner
"The four great motives which move men to social activity are hunger, love, vanity, and fear of superior powers. If we search out the causes which have moved men to war we find them under each of these motives or interests." - William Graham Sumner
"The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poorhouse." - William Graham Sumner
"What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found the courage to say that there is none." - William Graham Sumner
"We do not judge men by what they are in themselves, but by what they are relatively to us." - Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof
"Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owners knows not of." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"Men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"Men are contented to be laughed at for their wit, but not for their folly." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"Some men, under the notion of weeding our prejudices, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"The pious sectarian is proud because he is confident of his right of possession in God. The man of devotion is meek because he is conscious of God’s right of love over his life and soul. The object of our possession becomes smaller than ourselves, and without acknowledging it in so many words the bigoted sectarian has an implicit belief that God can be kept secured for certain individuals in a cage which is of their own make. In a similar manner the primitive races of men believe that their ceremonials have a magic influence upon their deities." -
"There are men whose idea of life is tactic, who long for its continuation after death only because of their wish for permanence and not perfection; they love to imagine that the things to which they are accustomed will persist for ever. They completely identify themselves in their minds with their fixed surroundings and with whatever they have gathered, and to have to leave these is death for them. They forget that the true meaning of living is outliving, it is ever growing out of itself." -
"Men that venture little, hazard little." - Richard Tarlton
"If men knew what felicity dwells in the cottage of a godly man, how sound he sleeps, how quiet his rest, how composed his mind, how free from care, how easy his position, how moist his mouth, how joyful his heart, they would never admire the noises, the diseases, the throngs of passions, and the violence of unnatural appetites that fill the house of the luxurious and the heart of the ambitious." - Jeremy Taylor
"It is a little learning, and but a little, which makes men conclude hastily. Experience and humility teach modesty and fear." - Jeremy Taylor
"Men are apt to prefer a prosperous error to an afflicted truth." - Jeremy Taylor
"Men of the noblest dispositions think themselves happiest when others share their happiness with them." - Jeremy Taylor
"Temptation rarely comes in working hours. It is in their leisure time that men are made or marred." - William Mackergo Taylor
"Prejudices may be intense, but their lives are limited. To discover when they are dead and to bury them, is an important matter, and no unseemly tears should be shed at their funerals... Human nature is so constituted, that all see, and judge better, in the affairs of other men, than in their own." -
"What fools men are to weep the dead and gone! Unwept, youth drops its petals one by one." - Theognis, aka Theognis of Megara NULL
"He who hates vice hates men. [hate [moral] failings and you hate people]" - Publilius Clodius Thrasea Paetus (sometimes inverted Paetus Thrasea)
"There is no readier way for a man to bring his own worth into question than by endeavoring to detract from the worth of other men." - John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
"In democratic countries, however opulent a man is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his fortune because he finds that he is less rich than his father was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself. Most rich men in democracies are therefore constantly haunted by the desire of obtaining wealth, and they naturally turn their attention to trade and manufactures, which appear to offer the readiest and most efficient means of success. In this respect they share the instincts of the poor without feeling the same necessities; say, rather, they feel the most imperious of all necessities, that of not sinking in the world." -
"Taken as a whole, men will only devote their enthusiasm, their time, and their energy to matters in which their passions have a personal interest. But their personal interests, however powerful they may be, will never carry them very far or very high unless they can be made to seem noble and legitimate in their own eyes by being allied to some great cause in which the whole human race can join." -
"The principle of self-interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrificed, but it suggest daily small acts of self-denial. By itself it cannot suffice to make a man virtuous; but it disciplines a number of person sin habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, self-command; and if it does not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws them in that direction by their habits. If the principle of interest rightly understood were to sway the whole moral world, extraordinary virtues would doubtless be more rare; but I think that gross depravity would then also be less common. The principle of interest rightly understood perhaps prevents men from rising far above the level of mankind, but a great number of other men, who were falling far below it, are caught and restrained by it." -
"The principle of self-interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial. By itself it cannot suffice to make a an virtuous; but it disciplines a number of persons in habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, self-command; and, if it does not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws them in that direction by their habits. Observe some few individuals, they are lowered by it; survey mankind, it is raised." -
"The way to conquer men, is by their passions; catch but the ruling foible of their hearts, and all their boasted virtues shrink before you." - Francis Tolson
"Old men dream dreams; young men see visions." - Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
"Since we live in a changing universe, why do men oppose change?... If a rock is in the way, the root of a tree will change its direction. The dumbest animals try to adapt themselves to changed conditions. Even a rat will change its tactics to get a piece of cheese." - Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
"Men of splendid talents are generally too quick, too volatile, too adventurous, and too unstable to be much relied on; whereas men of common abilities, in a regular, plodding routine of business, act with more regularity and greater certainty. Men of the best intellectual abilities are apt to strike off suddenly, like the tangent of a circle, and cannot be brought into their orbits by attraction or gravity - they often act with such eccentricity as to be lost in the vortex of their own reveries. Brilliant talents in general are like the ignes fatui; they excite wonder, but often mislead. They are not, however, without their use; like the fire from the flint, once produced, it may be converted, by solid, thinking men, to very salutary and noble purposes." - John Trusler
"The absolute demonstration of man’s mastery of fate and command of all condition - the victory of man - all men in this racial man, this elder brother of mankind in his triumph over sin, fear and death! But one thing had remained in my mind as necessary to prove to the mass of men to-day man’s absolute supremacy over death in all its forms as an attribute of his oneness with God, with Eternal Life, Perfect Love, Perfect Justice, Omniscience and Omnipotence." - Paul Tyner