This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Roger L'Estrange, fully Sir Roger L'Estrange
It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water, they are good servants but bad masters.
Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales.
Paul Moody, fully Paul Dwight Moody
The measure of a man is not the number of his servants but in the number of people whom he serves.
What is it to be wise? 'Tis but to know how little can be known - to see all other's faults and feel our own.
Luxury is a remedy much worse than the disease it sets up to cure; or rather it is in itself the greatness of all evils; for every State, great or small: for, in order to maintain all the servants and vagabonds it creates, it brings oppression and ruin on the citizen and the laborer; it is like those scorching winds, which, covering the trees and plants with their devouring insects, deprive useful animals of their subsistence and spread famine and death wherever they blow.
Character | Death | Disease | Greatness | Luxury | Oppression | Order |
Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof
Our faults afflict us more than our good deeds console. Pain is ever uppermost in the conscience as in the heart.
Character | Conscience | Deeds | Good | Heart | Pain | Deeds |
Ten thousand of the greatest faults in our neighbors are of less consequence to us than one of the smallest in ourselves.
However fastidious we may be in love, we forgive more faults in love than in friendship.
Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
Idleness is the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active; and if it be not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy.
Body | Business | Cause | Devil | Idleness | Melancholy | Mind | Wisdom |
Edward Coke, fully Sir Edward Coke
The house of every man is his castle, and if thieves come to a man’s house to rob or murder, and the owner or his servants kill any of the thieves in defense of himself and his house, it is no felony and he lose nothing.
Lewis Dilwyn, fully Monsignor Dilwyn W Lewis
People are commonly so employed in pointing out faults in those before them, as to forget that some behind may at the same time be descanting on their own.