This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge. Mal-information is more hopeless that non-information; for error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, from which we must erase. Ignorance is contented to stand still with her back to the truth; but error is more presumptuous, and proceeds in the wrong direction. Ignorance has no light, but error flows a false one. The consequence is, that error, when she retraces her steps, has farther to go before she can arrive at truth, than ignorance.
Error | Ignorance | Knowledge | Light | Man | Truth | Wrong |
The wise man does not wrong in changing his habits with the times.
Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that has been done to us? That we may forgive it.
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
The superior man will watch over himself when he is alone. He examines his heart that there may be nothing wrong there, and that he may have not cause of dissatisfaction with himself.
Get into the habit of being both strict and friendly toward yourself; demand a certain standard of performance; approve of yourself, even reward yourself if you attain it. For too often we pursue just the wrong tactics. When we should be acting, we indulge or excuse ourselves for inactivity; we then upbraid and punish ourselves ruthlessly and futility. The scolding is futile because we somehow feel that, if we have been severe and cutting to ourselves, we have in some way atoned for the fault of non-performance. We have not, of course. We have not done what we planned, and we have discouraged and hurt ourselves in the bargain.
When you are irritated by his ‘pretentiousness’, you betray the character of your own: it is just as it should be that he increases while you decrease. Choose your opponents. To the wrong ones, you cannot afford to give a thought, but you must help the right ones, help them and yourself in a contest without tension.
Dr. Seuss, pen name for Theodore Seuss Geisel
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
The main thing wrong with a pattern of thought is the arrogant rigidity with which it is held.
It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observation of time and place and of decency in general that what is called taste consists; and which is in reality no other that a more refined judgment. The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.
Cause | Judgment | Manners | Observation | Reality | Skill | Taste | Time | Wrong |
To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.
Enemy | Hate | Magnanimity | Wrong |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Life as a sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. Many diverse details have a bearing on the preservation of life, and when we have our eyes on the future we have to engage ourselves in these details. But the only thing that is necessary is to live now, the future is not absolute but ever exposed to accident. Hence it is only the necessity of the immediate present which can justify a wrong action, because not to do the action would in turn be to cause not to do the action would in turn be to commit an offense, indeed the most wrong of all offenses, namely the complete destruction of the embodiment of freedom.
Absolute | Abstract | Accident | Action | Cause | Ends | Example | Freedom | Future | Justify | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Offense | Present | Property | Right | Rights | Self | Self-preservation | Wrong |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
To adhere to man’s absolute freedom - one aspect of the matter - is eo ipso to condemn slavery. Yet if a man is a slave, his own will is responsible for his slavery, just as it is its will which is responsible if a people is subjugated. Hence the wrong of slavery lies at the door not simply of enslavers or conquerors but of the slaves and the conquered themselves. Slavery occurs in man’s transition from the state of nature to genuinely ethical conditions; it occurs in a world where a wrong is still right. At that stage wrong has validity and so is necessarily in place.
Absolute | Freedom | Man | Nature | People | Right | Slavery | Will | World | Wrong |
Compassion...abolishes the distance, the in between which always exists in human inter course; and if virtue will always be ready to assert that it is better to suffer wrong than do wrong, compassion will transcend this by stating in complete and even naïve sincerity that it is easier to suffer than to see others suffer.
Better | Compassion | Sincerity | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Wrong |
The whole of life and experience goes to show, that right or wrong doing, whether as to the physical or the spiritual nature, is sure in the end to meet its appropriate reward or punishment. Penalties may be delayed but they are sure to come.
Experience | Life | Life | Nature | Punishment | Reward | Right | Wrong |
Calumny is a monstrous vice; for, where parties indulge in it, there are always two that are actively engaged in doing wrong, and one who is subject to injury. The calumniator inflicts wrong by slandering the absent; he who gives credit to the calumny before he has investigated the truth is equally implicated. The person traduced is doubly injured - first by him who propagates, and secondly by him who credits the calumny.