This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Honor sits smiling at the sale of truth." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"No society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion." - Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace
"The worst prison is a closed heart." - Plato NULL
"The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love, neither himself nor his own thins, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another." - Plato NULL
"The principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live - that principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honor, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honor and dishonor, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work." - Plato NULL
"Then I must surely be right in saying that we shall not be properly educated ourselves, nor will the guardians whom we are training, until we can recognize the qualities of discipline, courage, generosity, greatness of mind, and others akin to them, as well as their opposites in all their manifestations." - Plato NULL
"There are three classes of men - lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain." - Plato NULL
"Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find their teams going the other way; every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote - justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. I knew a man of simple habits and earnest character who never put out his hands nor opened his lips to court the public, and having survived several rotten reputations of younger men, honor came at last and sat down with him upon his private bench from which he had never stirred." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in bed and board; but let truth and love and honor and courtesy flow in all thy deeds." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The secret of genius is… first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The secret of genius is...first, last, midst, and without end to honor every truth by use." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You fear to quit the medleys of the world, where vanity reigns, where avarice tarnishes the most beautiful virtues, where infidelity holds dominion with the sway of a despot, where virtue is trampled under foot and vice carries off the prize of honor." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"What is hell? To live in slavery to others. How is heaven attained? The attainment of heaven is the freedom from cravings. What is a person’s duty? To do good to all beings. What are worthless as soon as they are won? Honor and fame. What brings happiness? The friendship of the holy. What destroys craving? Realization of one’s true self. Who are our enemies? Our sense-organs, when they are uncontrolled. Who are our friends? Our sense-organs, when they are controlled. Who has overcome the world? He who has conquered his own mind." - Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
"To be ambitious of true honor and of the real glory and perfection of our nature is the very principle and incentive of virtue; but to be ambitious of titles, place, ceremonial respects, and civil pageantry, is as vain and little as the things are which we court." - Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
"Take special care for that thou delight not in wine; for there never was any man who came to honor, or preferment that loved it; for it transformeth a man into a beast, decayeth health, poisoneth the breath, destroyeth natural heat, brings a man’s stomach to an artificial heat, deformeth the face, rotteth the teeth, and to conclude, maketh a man contemptible, soon old, and despised of all wise and worth men; hated in thy servants, in thyself, and companions; for it is a bewitching and infectious vice." - Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
"Honor is the moral conscience of the great." - William Davenant, fully Sir William Davenant, also spelled D'Avenant
"The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them." - Socrates NULL
"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be." - Socrates NULL
"The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be; all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them." - Socrates NULL
"Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud." - Sophocles NULL
"Chins without beards deserve no honor." - Spanish Proverbs
"The greatest honor I can give my children is love for our people, loyalty to self." - Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
"There is but one thing without honor, smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be, and that is unbelief. He who believes nothing, who believes only the show of things, is not in relation with nature and fact at all." - Thomas Carlyle
"They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. Not happiness, but something higher; one sees this even in the frivolous classes, with their “point of honor” and the like. Not by flattering our appetites - no, by awakening the heroic that slumbers in every heart can any religious gain follow." - Thomas Carlyle
"In everyday life there are always opportunities to honor both separateness and togetherness." - Thomas Moore
"No matter how burning the thirst, we must always take the time to honor the gift of water, for it is sacred. It is a gift of life. It is in the times of dire thirst, when the body craves the water the most, we should especially take the time for prayer and thanksgiving... If you do not honor and cherish the waters, then how can you ever expect others to?" - Tom Brown, Jr.
"Where there is no honor, there is no disgrace." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Beware of the temporariness of honor and approval." - Zelig Pliskin
"Discretion and hardy valor are the twins of honor, and, nursed together, make a conqueror; divided, but a talker." - Beaumont and Fletcher, Francis Beaumont (c.1585-1614) and John Fletcher
"Prestige involves at least two persons: one to claim it and another to honor the claim… In the status system of a society these claims are organized as rules and expectations which regulate who successfully claims prestige, from whom, in what ways, and on what basis. The level of self-esteem enjoyed by given individuals is more or less set by this status system." - C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
"Honor old age." - Chilon of Lacedemon NULL
"Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man, so weak, but it mates, and masters, the fear of death; and therefore, death is no such terrible enemy, when a man hath so many attendants about him, that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear preoccupieth it." - Francis Bacon
"There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what you have been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what you have been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it. What has become known can not become unknown again." - Gary Zukav
"Only a few rare souls in a century, to whose class I make no pretension, count much in the great flow of this Republic. The life stream of this nation is the generations of millions of human particles acting under the impulses of advancing ideas and national ideals gathered from a thousand springs... We are but transitory officials in government whose duty is to keep these channels clear and to strengthen and extend these dikes. What counts toward the honor of public officials is that they sustain the national ideals upon which are patterned the design of these channels of progress and the construction of these dikes of safety. " - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
"It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is. " - Herman Hesse
"In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. " - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"The Lord commands us to do good unto all men without exception, though the majority are very undeserving when judged according to their own merits... [The Scripture] teaches us that we must not think of man's real value, but only of his creation in the image of God to which we owe all possible honor and love." - John Calvin
"It is a shame for a man to desire honor because of his noble progenitors, and not to deserve it by his own virtue." - John Chrysotom
"It's true that charisma can make a person stand out for a moment, but character sets a person apart for a lifetime. You build trust with others each time you choose integrity over image, truth over convenience, or honor over personal gain. Character makes trust possible, and trust is the foundation of leadership. Character creates consistency, and if your people know what they can expect from you, they will continue to look to you for leadership. Over time, is it easier or harder to sustain your influence within your organization? With charisma alone, influence becomes increasingly more difficult to sustain. With character, as time passes, influence builds and requires less work to sustain." - John C. Maxwell