This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
It is part of human nature to think wise things and do ridiculous ones.
Human nature | Nature | Wisdom | Wise | Think |
The wisdom of a foole is in his tongue, & the tongue of the wise man is hydden in his hart.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
God, who is liberal in all his other gifts, shows us, by the wise economy of his providence, how circumspect we ought to be in the management of our time, for he never gives us two moments together.
God | Providence | Time | Wisdom | Wise |
The advertising industry is one of our most basic forms of communication and, allegedly, of information. Yet, obviously, much of this ostensible information is not purveyed to inform but to manipulate and to achieve a result -- to make somebody think he needs something that very possibly he doesn't need, or to make him think one version of something is better than another version when the ground for such a belief really doesn't exist.
Advertising | Belief | Better | Industry | Need | Wisdom | Think |
Incessant change, everlasting innovation, seem to be dictated by the true interests of mankind. But government is the perpetual enemy of change... The wise man is satisfied with nothing.
Change | Enemy | Government | Innovation | Man | Mankind | Nothing | Wisdom | Wise | Government |
Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way. That was a true proverb of the wise man, rely upon it; "Better is little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure, and trouble therewith."
Better | Fear | Happy | Little | Lord | Man | Money | Nature | Nothing | Wants | Will | Wisdom | Wise | Trouble |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development as supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.
Achievement | Belief | Civilization | Existence | Faith | Illusion | Instinct | Perfection | Present | Wisdom | Work |
Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and the half-wise that are dangerous.
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.