This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It has been shrewdly said that when men abuse us, we should suspect ourselves, and when they praise us, them. It is a rare instance of virtue to despise censure which we do not deserve, and still more rare to despise praise, which we do. But that integrity that lives only on opinion would starve without it." - Charles Caleb Colton
"There are three kinds of praise - that which we yield, that which we lend, and that which we pay. We yield it to the powerful from fear, we lend it to the weak from interest, and we pay it to the deserving from gratitude." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Censure is often useful, praise often deceitful." - Charles Churchill
"You can be cured in 14 days patients afflicted with melancholia if you follow this prescription. Try to think every day how you can please someone. It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow man who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring. All that we demand of a human being and the highest praise we can give him, is that he should be a good fellow worker, a friend to all other men, and a true partner in love and marriage." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure which is useful to them to praise which deceives them." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Generally we praise only to be praised... Refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"To praise great actions with sincerity may be said to be taking part in them." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"We are not fond of praising, and never praise any one except from interested motives. Praise is a clever, concealed, and delicate flattery, which gratifies in different ways the giver and the receiver. The one takes it as a recompense of his merit, and the other bestows it to display his equity and discernment." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"We never condemn vice or praise virtue without a selfish motive." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"We refuse praise from a desire to be praised twice." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living." - Eric Hoffer
"Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous." - Francis Bacon
"Self-appraisal will do more for you than self-praise will." - Frank Tyger
"True praise roots and spreads." - George Herbert
"Praise from your own mouth stinks." - German Proverbs
"Let us all resolve, first, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault-finding that does not good a sin, and to resolve, when we are ourselves happy, not to poison the atmosphere for our neighbors by calling upon them to remark every painful and disagreeable feature in their daily life, third, to practice the grace and virtue of praise." - Harriet Beecher Stowe
"The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a 'but.'" - Henry Ward Beecher
"There is not a person we employ who does not, like ourselves, desire recognition, praise, gentleness, forbearance, patience." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a "but."" - Henry Ward Beecher
"Praise in the beginning is agreeable enough; and we receive it as a favor; but when it comes in great quantities, we regard it only as a debt, which nothing but our merit could extort." - James Goldsmith
"It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their confusions." - John Ciardi, fully John Anthony Ciardi
"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." - John Milton
"Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature to lust. It means, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual and difficult work, to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept and by praise, but above all - by example." - John Ruskin
"Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes some places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it colors, is the essence of superstition." - John Ruskin
"The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure." - John Ruskin
"The highest thoughts are those which are least dependent on language, and the dignity of any composition and praise to which it is entitled are in exact proportion to is dependency of language and expression." - John Ruskin
"The laws, the life, and the joy of beauty in the material world of God, are as eternal and sacred parts of His creation as, in the world of spirits, virtue; and in the world of angels, praise." - John Ruskin
"Music when thus applied raises in the mind of the hearer great conceptions. It strengthens devotion, and advances praise into rapture." - Joseph Addison
"Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praise-worthy in human life." - Joseph Addison
"The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding." - Joseph Addison
"When all thy mercies, O my God, my rising soul surveys, transported with the view I’m lost, in wonder, love and praise." - Joseph Addison
"When a man seeks your advice he generally wants your praise." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"We are all excited by the love of praise, and the noblest are most influenced by glory." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"We are all imbued with the love of praise." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The way to be nothing is to do nothing." - Nathaniel Howe
"The way of this world is to praise dead saints and persecute living ones." - Nathaniel Howe
"“Every morning of the world I give thanks for all the wonderful things in my life,” declared a young man enthusiastically. “And do you know something? It’s strange indeed, but the more I give thanks, the more I have reason to be thankful. For, you see, blessings just pile up on me one after another like nobody’s business”... The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for... The attitude of gratitude revitalizes the entire mental process by activating all other attitudes, thus stimulating creativity... Remember that praise and thanksgiving are the most powerful prayers of all." - Norman Vincent Peale
"The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned, freedom from intrusion. He needs a little privacy quite as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise." - Phyllis McGinley
"Those who are greedy of praise prove that they are poor in merit." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"If our own conscience protests and refuses to accept praise then it is proof against the flatterer. " - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"It’s about whether we’re going to be able to look forward to our descendants and hand this world over to them in much better shape, so they will look back on us with kindness and with praise – rather than cursing us for our apathy, or our narcissism, or our refusal to stand up tall for justice and freedom in the world." - Ralph Nader
"A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the motion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary, but everything hath affinities infinite." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Blame is safer than praise." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Make friends with the angels, who though invisible are always with you. Often invoke them, constantly praise them, and make good use of their help and assistance in all your temporal and spiritual affairs." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL