Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Jean de La Bruyère

We never deceive for a good purpose; knavery adds malice to falsehood.

Character | Falsehood | Good | Malice | Purpose | Purpose |

Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland

Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it.

Character | Culture | Malice | Temptation | Temptation |

Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland

Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbors made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may.

Business | Character | Dirty | Life | Life | Malice |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Character | Idealism | Malice | Stupidity | Zeal |

Abraham Lincoln

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphans - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Battle | Care | Character | Charity | Firmness | God | Malice | Nations | Peace | Right | Work | God |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Truth, wisdom, love, seek reasons; malice only seeks causes.

Character | Love | Malice | Truth | Wisdom |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

We can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.

Character | Esteem | Evil | Malice | Pity | Stupidity | Unhappiness | Think |

Gabriel Riesser

May those who represent advanced views bear in mind that true wisdom is always joined with mildness, that malice never converts the erring but strengthens him in his attitude, and that it is very unfitting to combat error (so long as this does not assume the aspect of injustice) with the weapons of hatred.

Character | Error | Malice | Mind | Weapons | Wisdom |

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature; the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick.

Character | Good | Little | Malice | Nature |

Jack Holland

Gossip is always a personal confession of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbor made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may.

Business | Dirty | Life | Life | Malice | Wisdom |

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley

A sudden lie may be sometimes only manslaughter upon truth; but by a carefully constructed equivocation, truth always is with malice a forethought deliberately murdered.

Equivocation | Forethought | Malice | Truth | Wisdom |

Charley Reese

If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.

Envy | Malice |

Nick Dimos

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Malice | Stupidity |