This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.
Censure | Falsehood | Praise | Self | Self-praise | Superiority | Wisdom |
When you praise someone you call yourself his equal.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our powers of judgment are more completely exposed by being overpraised than by being unjustly underestimated.
Creativity is a flower that praise brings to bloom, but discouragement often nips in the bud.
Creativity | Praise | Wisdom |
More people praise the Bible than read it, more read it than understand it, and more understand it than follow it.
Anselm of Canterbury, aka Saint Anselm or Archbishop of Canterbury NULL
Since all justice is rightness, the justice, which brings praise to the one who preserves it, is in nowise in any except rational beings… This justice is not rightness of knowledge, or rightness of action, but rightness of will.
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
All our distinctions are accidental; beauty and deformity, though personal qualities, are neither entitled to praise nor censure; yet it is so happens that they color our opinion of those qualities to which mankind have attached responsibility.
Beauty | Censure | Mankind | Opinion | Praise | Qualities | Responsibility | Wisdom | Beauty |
John Blofeld, fully John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld
The world is full of paradox. For example, [in Buddhism] though no notion of a creator is entertained, great stress is laid upon the need for faith and piety. By faith is meant not trust in a benevolent diety avid for love, praise and obedience, but conviction that beyond the seeming reality misreported by our senses which is inherently unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively perceived, will give our lives undreamed-of meaning and endow the most insignificant object with holiness and beauty.
Beauty | Example | Faith | Love | Meaning | Mystery | Need | Obedience | Object | Paradox | Piety | Praise | Reality | Trust | Will | World |
Saint Bonaventure, born John of Fidanza Bonaventure
If there be any man who is not enlightened by this sublime magnificence of created things, he is blind. If there be any man who is not aroused by the clamor of nature, he is deaf. If there be any one who, seeing all these works of God, does not praise him, he is dumb; if there be any one who, from so many signs, cannot perceive the First Principle, that man is foolish.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The poet is the equable man, not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns, nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad, he bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less, he is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key... As he sees the farthest he has the most faith, his thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things, in the dispute on God and eternity he is silent, he sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement, he sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots.
Dispute | Dreams | Eternity | Faith | God | Good | Man | Men | Nothing | Object | Play | Praise | Wisdom | God |
Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
Censure is often useful, praise often deceitful.
As a solid rock cannot be moved by the wind, the wise are not shaken by praise or blame.