This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The essence of justice is mercy. Making a child suffer for wrong-doing is merciful to the child. There is no mercy in letting a child have its own will, plunging headlong to destruction wit the bits in its mouth. There is no mercy to society nor to the criminal if the wrong is not repressed and the right vindicated. We injure the culprit who comes up to take his proper doom at the bar of justice, if we do not make him feel that he has done a wrong thing. We may deliver his body from the prison, but not at the expense of justice nor to his own injury.
Body | Character | Justice | Mercy | Prison | Right | Society | Will | Wit | Wrong | Society | Child |
It is a certain rule that wit and passion are entirely incompatible. When the affections are moved, there is no place for the imagination.
Character | Imagination | Passion | Rule | Wit |
Let your wit rather serve you for a buckler to defend yourself, by a handsome reply, than the sword to wound others, though with ever so facetious reproach; remembering that a word cuts deeper than a sharper weapon and the wound it makes is longer curing.
Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
Perpetual aiming at wit is a very bad part of conversation. It is done to support a character: it generally fails; it is a sort of insult on the company, and a restraint upon the speaker.
Character | Conversation | Insult | Restraint | Wit | Insult |
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
Enough | Judgment | Misfortune | Wisdom | Wit | Misfortune |
The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.
Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.
Constraint | Effort | Language | Play | Speech | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Wit | Words | Work | Thought |
Propertius, fully Sextus Propertius NULL
Let each man have the wit to go his own way.
Be not too slow in the breaking of a sinful custom; a quick, courageous resolution is better than a gradual deliberation; in such a combat he is the bravest soldier that lays about him without fear or wit. Wit pleads, fear disheartens; he that would kill Hydra had better strike off one neck than five heads: fell the tree, and the branches are soon cut off.
Better | Custom | Deliberation | Fear | Kill | Resolution | Wisdom | Wit |