This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.
Art | Cause | Character | Difficulty | Good | Men | Mistake | Thinking | Virtue | Virtue | Art |
George Villiers 2nd Duke of Buckingham
All true love is founded on esteem.
If men wound you with injuries, meet them with patience; hasty words rankle the wound, soft language dresses it, forgiveness cures it, and oblivion takes away the scar. It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury; than by argument to overcome it.
Argument | Character | Forgiveness | Language | Men | Oblivion | Patience | Silence | Words | Forgiveness |
We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together.
William J. H. Boetcker, fully William John Henry Boetcker
If you want to earn more - learn more. If you want to get more out of the world you must put more into the world. For, after all, men will get no more out of life than they put into it.
Pure friendship is something which men of an inferior intellect can never taste.
Character | Men | Taste | Friendship | Intellect |
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best a specious an ingenious sort of idleness; and the knowledge we acquire by it only a credible kind of ignorance, nothing more.
Better | Character | Idleness | Ignorance | Knowledge | Men | Nothing | Study |
I must confess, as the experience of my own soul, that the expectation of loving my friends in heaven principally kindles my love to them while on earth.
Character | Earth | Expectation | Experience | Heaven | Love | Soul | Expectation | Friends |
It does not take great men to do great things; it only takes consecrated men.
Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason.
In love one has need of being believed, in friendship of being understood.
Character | Love | Need | Friendship |
Heywood Broun, fully Matthew Heywood Campbell Broun
The ability to make love frivolously is the thing which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.