This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Vanity finds in self-love so powerful an ally that it storms, as it were by a coup de main, the citadel of our heads." - James Bryant Conant
"Self-denial is often the sacrifice of one sort of self-love for another." - James Bryant Conant
"The root of all discontent is self-love." - James Freeman Clarke
"If we listen to our self-love, we shall estimate our lot less by; what it is than by what it is not; shall dwell upon its hindrances and be blind to its possibilities; and, comparing it only with imaginary lives, shall indulge in flattering dreams of what we should do if we had but power, and give if we had but wealth, and be if we had no temptations." - James Martineau
"Conscience and self-love, if we understand our true happiness, always lead us the same way. Duty and interest are perfectly coincident; for the most part in this world, but entirely and in every instance if we take in the future, and the whole; this being implied in the notion of a good and perfect administration of things." - Joseph Butler
"Not wishing to be other than they are, the blameless ones, in their self-love, cannot conceive the real alternative; another self, cleansed of guilt and freed from folly, capable of renewal." - Lewis Mumford
"In an emotionally healthy person there must be self-love as well as love of others. Lack of self-esteem is probably the most common emotional ailment." - Norman Vincent Peale
"The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love, neither himself nor his own thins, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another." - Plato NULL
"Blinded as they are as to their true character by self-love, every man is his own first and chiefest flatterer." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even when the quality of the ambition is intellectual. For ambition, even of this quality is but a form of self-love." - Henry Taylor, fully Sir Henry Taylor
"Obsessive, but not genuine self-love leaves no room for intimacy with another." - Thomas Moore
"Calumny, the immortal daughter of self-love and idleness." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles that provision for the perpetuity of mankind; it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, but we must conceal it." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return form them." - William Hazlitt
"The secret of our self-love is just the same as that of our liberality and candor. Wee prefer ourselves to others only because we have a more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person’s." - William Hazlitt
"We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love." - William Hazlitt
"The world is governed by love, self-love." - Antoine de Rivarol, also known as Comte de Rivarol
"Doubt is the trouble of a soul left to itself, which wants to see what God hides from it, and out of self-love seeks impossible securities." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
"Offended self-love never forgives." - Giovani Ruffini
"Man, during his abode in this world, knows not his own heart. Self-love spreads a veil over his imperfections, and conceals the knowledge of his true state, both from himself and from others. But on this day he shall be seen in his true dress, both by himself and by all mankind. The just man is disregarded and despised in this world: he is subjected in a great measure to the will of the sinner; his life is esteemed folly, and his end without honour. He, likewise, shall be seen in his true light on this day, and shall be honoured before the whole world with that honour to which his merits are entitled." - Jean Baptiste Massillon
"There are wounds of self-love which one does not confess to one's dearest friends." - Jean-Antoine Petit-Senn
"A young man when he enters society must be preserved from vanity rather than from sensibility; he succumbs rather to the tastes of others than to his own, and self-love is responsible for more libertines than love. Self-love makes more libertines than love." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"There are wounds of self-love which one does not confess to one's dearest friends." - John Antoine Petit-Senn
"The great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community ... that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same." - John Quincy Adams
"Our self-love can be resigned to the sacrifice of everything but itself." - Jean-François de La Harpe
"Love: that self-love a deux. " - Madame de Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, born Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Madame Necker
"Our self-love is mortified, when we think our opinions, and even our tastes, customs, and dresses, either arraigned or condemned; as, on the contrary, it is tickled and flattered by approbation." - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"We must eradicate self-love and conceit, because by flattering us beforehand they render us less resistant to flatterers." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Supreme and abiding self-love is a very dwarfish affection, but a giant evil." - Richard Cecil
"Whatsoever is good in a natural man is depraved by a self-end; self-love rules all his actions. He keeps within himself and makes his chief end himself, and he is a god to himself. God is but his idol. This is true of all natural men in this world; they make themselves their last end, and where the end is depraved, the whole course is corrupted." - Richard Sibbes (or Sibbs)
"A Faint Music - Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing." - Robert Hass, aka The Bard of Berkeley
"When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears." - Robert Hass, aka The Bard of Berkeley
"O You who are mad about Your creature! true God and true Man, You have left Yourself wholly to us, as food, so that we will not fall through weariness during our pilgrimage in this life, but will be fortified by You, celestial nourishment." - Saint Catherine of Siena NULL
"What is natural cannot be changed while nature remains.* But contrary opinions cannot be in the same mind at the same time: therefore no opinion or belief is sent to man from God contrary to natural knowledge. And therefore the Apostle says: The word is near in thy heart and in thy mouth, that is, the word of faith which we preach (Rom. x, 8). But because it surpasses reason it is counted by some as contrary to reason, which cannot be. To the same effect is the authority of Augustine: What truth reveals can nowise be contrary to the holy books either of the Old or of the New Testament." Hence the conclusion is evident, that any arguments alleged against the teachings of faith do not proceed logically from first principles of nature, principles of themselves known, and so do not amount to a demonstration; but are either probable reasons or sophistical; hence room is left for refuting them." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis
"There is no particular teaching or way, but the buddha-nature of all is the same, what we find is the same." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
"In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"In the admirable difference of the features of men; which is a great argument that the world was made by a wise Being. This could not be wrought by chance, or be the work of mere nature, since we find never, or very rarely, two persons exactly alike. This distinction is a part of infinite wisdom; otherwise what confusion would be introduced into the world! Without this, parents could not know their children, nor children their parents, nor a brother his sister, nor a subject his magistrate. Without it there had been no comfort of relations, no government, no commerce. Debtors would not have been known from strangers, nor good men from bad. Propriety could not have been preserved, nor justice executed; the innocent might have been apprehended for the innocent; wickedness could not have been stopped by any law." - Stephen Charnock
"Self-love is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others." - Thomas Jefferson
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"It belongs only to adjust the courage to life." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"They use baths, and moreover they have warm ones according to the Roman custom, and they make use also of olive oil. They have found out, too, a great many secret cures for the preservation of cleanliness and health. And in other ways they labor to cure the epilepsy, with which they are often troubled." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"The progress of these terrors is plainly shown us in our Lord's agony in the garden, when the reality of this eternal death so broke in upon Him, so awakened and stirred itself in Him, as to force great drops of blood to sweat from His body... His agony was His entrance into the last, eternal terrors of the lost soul, into the real horrors of that dreadful, eternal death which man unredeemed must have died into when he left this world. We are therefore not to consider our Lord's death upon the Cross as only the death of that mortal body which was nailed to it, but we are to look upon Him with wounded hearts, as being fixed and fastened in the state of that twofold death, which was due to the fallen nature, out of which He could not come till He could say, It is finished; Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.." - William Law
"Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Jealousy feeds upon suspicion, and it turns into fury or it ends as soon as we pass from suspicion to certainty." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"The shame that arises from praise which we do not deserve often makes us do things we should otherwise never have attempted." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"The business of conception is to present us with an exact transcript of what we have felt or perceived. But we have, moreover, a power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones together, so as to form new wholes of our own creation. I shall employ the word imagination to express this power, and I apprehend that this is the proper sense of the word, if imagination be the power which gives birth to the productions of the poet and the painter. The operations of imagination are by no means confined to the materials which conception furnishes, but may be equally employed about all the subjects of our knowledge." - Dugald Stewart
"A genius with the IQ of a moron." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal