This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Never talk of yourself. You must either praise yourself, which is vain, or blame yourself, which is small-minded.
If we regulate our conduct according to our own convictions, we may safely disregard the praise or censure of others.
Censure | Conduct | Convictions | Praise |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves. They will pardon much unconventionality in a man who has enough jollity and friendliness to make it clear, even to the stupidest, that he is not engaged in criticizing them.
Convention | Criticism | Enough | Fury | Man | Pardon | People | Regard | Will |
It is a curious paradox that precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity, to those mysterious powers assumed by others.
Few things are more agreeable to self-love than revenge, and yet no cause so effectually restrains us from revenge as self-love. And this paradox naturally suggests another; that the strength of the community is not infrequently built upon the weakness of those individuals that compose it.
Cause | Love | Paradox | Revenge | Self | Self-love | Strength | Weakness |
It has been shrewdly said that when men abuse us, we should suspect ourselves, and when they praise us, them. It is a rare instance of virtue to despise censure which we do not deserve, and still more rare to despise praise, which we do. But that integrity that lives only on opinion would starve without it.
Abuse | Censure | Despise | Integrity | Men | Opinion | Praise | Virtue | Virtue |
Expect not praise without envy until you are dead. Honors bestowed on the illustrious dead have in them no admixture of envy; for the living pity the dead; and pity and envy, like oil and vinegar, assimilate not.
There are three kinds of praise - that which we yield, that which we lend, and that which we pay. We yield it to the powerful from fear, we lend it to the weak from interest, and we pay it to the deserving from gratitude.
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
You can be cured in 14 days patients afflicted with melancholia if you follow this prescription. Try to think every day how you can please someone. It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow man who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring. All that we demand of a human being and the highest praise we can give him, is that he should be a good fellow worker, a friend to all other men, and a true partner in love and marriage.
Day | Friend | Good | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Man | Marriage | Men | Praise | Think |
Men are oftener treacherous through weakness than design.
We refuse praise from a desire to be praised twice.
We are not fond of praising, and never praise any one except from interested motives. Praise is a clever, concealed, and delicate flattery, which gratifies in different ways the giver and the receiver. The one takes it as a recompense of his merit, and the other bestows it to display his equity and discernment.
Discernment | Display | Equity | Flattery | Merit | Motives | Praise | Recompense |
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice.
Avarice | Benevolence | Circumstances | Power | Property | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Weakness | Society |
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned into it), are the natural securities for this transmission.
Avarice | Benevolence | Circumstances | Distinction | Family | Possessions | Power | Property | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Weakness | Wealth | Society |
Vengeance always springs from weakness of spirit, which is incapable of enduring insults and injuries.
Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure which is useful to them to praise which deceives them.
Generally we praise only to be praised... Refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.