This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
The apparently irreconcilable dissimilarity between our wishes and our means, between our hearts and this world, remains a riddle.
Wishes |
However many blessings we expect from God, His infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts.
John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”
If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.
Human happiness does not consist in satisfying one’s personal wishes but in the certainty of being needed, in having the visions of goals still unattained.
Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
Theoretically, religion wishes to make men serene and inwardly peaceful by reaching a loving and forgiving god. But in practice, there is too much undissolved wrath and punishment in most religions.
Men | Punishment | Religion | Wishes |
Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre
It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them.
God | Man | Men | Misfortune | Rights | Will | Wishes | Misfortune | God |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
Lloyd C. Douglas, fully Lloyd Cassel Douglas, born Doya C. Douglas
A talent for truth is real property. If a man loves truth better than things, people like to be around where he is. Almost everybody wishes he could be honest, but you can’t have the spirit of truth when your heart is set on dickering for things.
Better | Heart | Man | People | Spirit | Truth | Wishes | Talent |
Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction—a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so.
Duty | Mankind | People | Reason | Sense | Teach | Wants | Wise | Wishes |
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
He who only wishes and hopes does not interfere actively with the course of events and with the shaping of his own destiny.
Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life.
Death | Desire | Eternal | Man | Nothing | Reality | Time | Wants | Wishes | Value |
Maria Von Ebner-Eschenbach, or Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachová, Marie Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach
The poor man wishes to conceal his poverty, and the rich man his wealth: the former fears lest he be despised, the latter lest he be plundered.
Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
We never do what we wish when we wish it, and when we desire a thing earnestly, and it does arrive, that or we are changed, so that we slide from the summit of our wishes and find ourselves where we were
Max Weber, formally Maximilian Carl Emil Weber
[In] the realm of science... what we have achieved will be obsolete in ten, twenty or fifty years. That is the fate, indeed, that is the very meaning of scientific work. ... Every scientific “fulfillment” raises new “questions” and cries out to be surpassed rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this.
Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
He who wishes to be benevolent will not be rich.
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
Love wishes to perpetuate itself. Love wishes for immortality.