This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"If our souls be immortal, this makes amends for the frailties of life and the sufferings of this state." - John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
"Forgiveness. The experience of reconciliation following upon some breach of trust, marked on the one side by the acknowledgement of wrongdoing and the desire to make amends and on the other side by the capacity to understand and the willingness to resume friendly relations." - Anton Theophilus Boisen
"It is the highest form of self-respect to admit our errors and mistakes and make amends for them. To make a mistake is only an error in judgment, but to adhere to it when it is discovered shows infirmity of character." - Dale E. Turner
"There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the immortals." - William Hazlitt
"Virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin; and sin that amends is but patched with virtue." - William Shakespeare
"History makes us some amends for the shortness of life." - Philip Skelton
"By occasions the strong become weak. To converse too frequently with women, and not suffer by it, is as hard as to take fire into one's bosom, and not to be burnt. What has a religious man to do with women, unless it be when he hears their confession, or gives them necessary spiritual instructions? He that thinks himself secure, is undone; the devil finding [something] to take hold on, though it be but a hair, raises a dreadful war." - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL
"A sick man’s sacrifice is but a lame oblation." - Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne
"The decay of sense in men waking is not the decay of the motion made in sense, but an obscuring of it in such manner as the light of the sun obscureth the light of the stars, which stars do no less exercise their virtue, by which they are visible, in the day than in the night. But because amongst many strokes which our eyes, ears, and other organs, receive from external bodies, the predominant only is sensible; therefore, the light of the sun being predominant, we are not affected with the action of the stars. And any object being removed from our eyes, though the impression it made in us remain, yet other objects more present succeeding and working on us, the imagination of the past is obscured, and made weak, as the voice of a man is in the noise of the day. From whence it followeth that the longer the time is, after the sight or sense of any object, the weaker is the imagination. For the continual change of man’s body destroys in time the parts which in sense were moved; so that distance of time, and of place, hath one and the same effect in us. For as at a great distance of place that which we look at appears dim and without distinction of the smaller parts, and as voices grow weak and inarticulate, so also after great distance of time our imagination of the past is weak; and we lose, for example, of cities we have seen many particular streets, and of actions many particular circumstances. This ‘decaying sense,’ when we would express the thing itself, I mean ‘fancy’ itself, we call ‘imagination,’ as I said before; but when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is called ‘memory.’ So that imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names." - Thomas Hobbes
"The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"And, as the soldiers bore dead bodies by, he called them untaught knaves, unmannerly, to bring a slovenly unhandsome corse betwixt the wind and his nobility." - William Shakespeare
"Apollo's angry; and the heavens themselves do strike at my injustice." - William Shakespeare