This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
The gain of lying is nothing else but not to be trusted of any, nor to be believed when we say the truth.
Custom is generally too hard for Conscience. Custom is the Guide of the Ignorant. Custom without Reason, is but an ancient Error.
Conscience | Custom | Error | Reason |
The pressure that has been brought to bear upon the native people, since the cessation of armed conflict, in the attempt to force conformity of custom and habit has caused a reaction more destructive than war, and the injury has not only affected the Indian, but has extended to the white population as well. Tyranny, stupidity, and lack of vision have brought about the situation now alluded to as the “Indian Problem.”
Conformity | Custom | Force | Habit | People | Stupidity | Tyranny | Vision | War |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.
Disrespect | Lying | Man | Order | Truth |
A custom of the world is so that we don’t see in a sea of mysteries the shores.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The most common lie is the lie one tells oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.
Lying |
Normal children often pass through stages of passionate cruelty, laziness, lying and thievery.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift or law there is far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.
Absolute | Conformity | Crime | Custom | Force | Ideas | Law | Personality | Philosophy |
Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth--of carefully respecting the property of others--of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or stealing.
With attention deficit democracy, I am trying to wake up people to how the combination of mass ignorance, fear mongering by the government, and lying politicians is putting our entire system of government to a death spiral.
Attention | Death | Fear | Government | Lying | People | System | Government |
Be not so bigoted to any custom as to worship it at the expense of truth.
Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.
When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great Day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.
Appearance | Day | Desire | Envy | Grief | Heart | Little | Lying | Men | Parents | Sorrow | World |
Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
All that's visible springs from causes intimate to you. While walking, sitting, lying down, the body itself is complete truth. If someone asks the inner meaning of this: "Inside the treasury of dharma eye a single grain of dust.