This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Honest work bears a lovely face for it is the father of pleasure and the mother of good fortune. It is the keystone of prosperity and the sire of fame. And best of all, work is relief from sorrow and the handmaiden of happiness." - Eugene P. Bertin, fully Eugene Peter Bertin
"Let us not say, every man is the architect of his own fortune; but let us say, every man is the architect of his character." - George Dana Boardman "The Younger"
"Keep the middle path of strength and virtue, lest you be overwhelmed by misfortune or corrupted by pleasant fortune. All that falls short or goes too far ahead, has contempt for happiness, and gains not the reward for labor done. It rests in your own hands what shall be the nature of the fortune which you choose to form for yourself. For all fortune which seems difficult, either exercises virtue, or corrects or punishes vice." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
"Of all suffering from fortune, the unhappiest misfortune is to have known a happy fortune." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
"The use we make of our fortune determines as to its sufficiency. A little is enough if used wisely, and too much if expended foolishly." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"The use we make of our fortune determines as to its sufficiency. A little is enough if used wisely, and too much if expended foolishly." - John Christian Bovee
"There is nothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a great one. Poverty treads on the heels of great and unexpected riches." - Jean de La Bruyère
"As full ears load and lay down corn, so does too much fortune bend and break the mind. It deserves to be considered, too, as another disadvantage, that affliction moves pity, and reconciles our very enemies, but prosperity provokes envy, and loses us our very friends." - Pierre Charron
"Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading." - Rufus Choate
"Industry is fortune's right hand, and Frugality her left; a proverb which has been worth ten times more to me than all my little purse contained." - Maria Edgeworth
"There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change." - Euripedes NULL
"Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us. Its appetite grows keener by indulgence and all we can gratify it with at present serves but the more to inflame its insatiable desires." - Benjamin Franklin
"Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day." - Benjamin Franklin
"To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously unsusceptible." - Benjamin Franklin
"The man who comes up with a means of doing or producing almost anything better, faster, or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips." - J. Paul Getty, fully Jean Paul Getty
"It is harder to find a man who can bear good fortune well than one who can bear misfortune well." - Gobyrus NULL
"Only learn to seize good fortune, for good fortune is always here." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Whether a man accepts from fortune her spade and will look downward and dig, or from aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"There is no man whom Fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in a the door an flies out at the window." - Lorenzo Imperiali
"Some men make money not for the sake of living, but ache in blindness of greed and live for their fortune's sake." - Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL
"Wisdom is the conqueror of fortune." - Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL
"If you run after fortune, you may be running away from contentment." - Lazerov NULL
"Seldom men are blessed with good fortune and good sense at the same time." - Livy, formally Titus Livius, aka Titus Livy NULL
"Fortune often guards the guilty." - Lucan, full name Marcus Annaeus Lucanus NULL
"Even the happiest choice, where favoring heaven has equal love and easy fortune given, think not, the husband gained, that all is done; the prize of happiness must still be won; and, oft, the careless find it to their cost, the lover in the husband may be lost; the graces might, alone, his heart allure; they and the virtues, meeting, must secure." - George Lyttleton, 1st Baron Lyttleton of Frankley
"I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force." - Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
"Fortune gives many too much, but none enough." - Martial, full name Marcus Valarius Martialis NULL
"The difficulties, hardships, and trials of life, the obstacles one encounters on the road to fortune, are positive blessings. They knit the muscles more firmly, and teach self-reliance. Peril is the element in which power is developed." - William Matthews
"O, how full of error is the judgment of mankind. They wonder at results when they are ignorant of the reasons. They call it fortune when they know not the cause, and thus worship their own ignorance changed into a deity." - Metastasio, aka Pietro Petastasio, pseudonymn for Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi NULL
"The only good histories are those that have been written by the very men who were in command in the affairs, or who were participants in the conduct of them or who at least have had the fortune to conduct others of the same sort... What can you expect of a doctor discussing war, or a schoolboy discussing the intentions of princes?" - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"And all your fortune lies beneath your hat." - John Oldham
"Fortune is more easily gotten than kept." - Publius Syrus
"That is a most wretched fortune which is without an enemy." - Publius Syrus
"When Fortune favors a man too much she makes him a fool." - Publius Syrus
"Necessity of action takes away fear of the act, and makes bold resolution the favorite of fortune." - Francis Quarles
"The methods that help a man acquire a fortune are the very ones that keep him from enjoying it." - Antoine de Rivarol, also known as Comte de Rivarol
"It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune; and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it." - Mayer Rothschild, fully Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild
"Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Court the society of a superior, and make much of the opportunity; for in the company of an equal thy good fortune must decline." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL
"It is criminal to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"Union does everything when it is perfect; it satisfies desires, it simplifies needs, it foresees the wishes of the imagination; it is an aisle always open, and becomes a constant fortune." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity." -
"An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson