This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man." - George Bernard Shaw
"Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one." - Hannah Arendt
"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter so much what you do in particular, so long as you're living your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?" - Henry James
"With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under the ground." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If wealth is to be valued because it gives leisure, clearly it would be a mistake to sacrifice leisure in the struggle for wealth." - John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 4th Baronet, Sir John Lubbock
"Don't mistake pleasure for happiness. They are a different breed of dogs." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"Any man can make a mistake; only a fool keeps making the same one." - Latin Proverbs
"Any man may commit a mistake, but none but a fool will continue in it." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Most people believe the achievements of war more important than those of peace, but this is a mistake." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The true source of cheerfulness is benevolence. The pursuits of mankind are commonly frigid and contemptible, and the mistake comes, at last, to be detected. But virtue is a charm that never fades. The soul that perceptually overflows with kindness and sympathy will always be cheerful." - Parke Godwin
"Love and hell are alike in that respect; they are what you bring to them. The script is yours; only the props are furnished." - Parke Godwin
"Who can mistake great thoughts? They seize upon the mind; arrest and search and shake it; bow the tall soul as by wind; rush over it like rivers over reeds." - Philip James Bailey
"There is nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final." - Phyllis Bottome, aka Phyllis Forbes Dennis (married name)
"When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind, and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power." - Phyllis Bottome, aka Phyllis Forbes Dennis (married name)
"People sometimes talk as if ‘selection’ were an essential part of every artist’s work. This is a mistake. In art proper there is no such thing; the artist draws what he sees, expresses what he feels, makes a clean breast of his experience." - R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
"It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness; and I pronounce it as certain that there was never yet a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We must always seek to reach up and reach out to achieve our full potential... It is a mistake to assume that we can ever achieve perfection. But it is an even greater mistake to cease trying. Without risk there will be neither success nor failure. As Thomas Aquinas observed: If the primary aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever." -
"Both bondage and liberation are the fictions of our ignorance. They do not really exist in the Atman. Just as a piece of rope remains rope, whether or not we mistake it for a snake. The imagined snake does not really exist in the rope. The Atman is infinite, without parts, beyond action... There is neither birth nor death, neither bound nor aspiring soul, neither liberated soul nor seeker after liberation - this is the ultimate and absolute truth." - Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
"Eat slowly; only men in rags and gluttons old in sin mistake themselves for carpet-bags and tumble victuals in." - Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic." - Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
"The sages do not consider that making no mistake is a blessing. They believe, rather, that the great virtue of a person lies in their ability to correct their mistakes and continually to make a new person of themselves." - Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
"Demanding security and certainty prevents peace of mind. No human has the omniscience to foresee everything. Always realize the unexpected can occur. Plan as much as is appropriate, but realize that regardless of how much you plan there will always be difficulties that you had previously not imagined. By expecting there will always be unexpected occurrences and accepting them, you will have much greater peace of mind than if you have unrealistic expectations of complete control. A person would be making a big mistake if he felt that the way to peace of mind is to obtain complete security from all risks... Uncertainty is inevitable... The demand for success is detrimental to peace of mind... Keep your focus on trying to accomplish with the best of your ability." - Zelig Pliskin
"A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying." - B. F. Skinner, fully Burrhus Frederic "B.F." Skinner
"Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions. " - Edward R. Murrow, born Egbert Roscoe Murrow
"Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom. " - Erik Erickson
"The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"Do not mistake a child for his symptom. " - Erik Erickson
"A doctrine is something that pins you down to a given mode of conduct and dozens of situations which you cannot foresee, which is a great mistake in principle." - George F. Kennan
"It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour. " - George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
"It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"People who are in despair always make a mistake when they hang themselves; the next day often brings the unknown. " - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue." - Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
"Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking." - James Russell Lowell
"People mistake their limitations for high standards. " - Jean Toomer
"The great imperfection of most of us proceeds from want of reflection, but, on the other hand, there are many who think overmuch, who fall into the mistake of too close self-inspection, and who are perpetually fretting over their failings and weaknesses." - Jean-Pierre Camus de Pontcarré
"I conclude that it is a fundamental mistake to think that salvation, justice, or virtue come through merely human institutions. " - Jeane Kirkpatrick
"The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity." - John Dewey
"Never mistake activity for achievement." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
"The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one." - John C. Maxwell
"A mistake is simply another way of doing things." - Katharine Graham
"It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world." - Lester Pearson, fully Lester Bowles "Mike" Pearson
"Some men mistake talking about sense, for talking sense." - Lord Brooke, Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, de jure 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Brooke
"A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time." - Louis L'Amour, fully Louis Dearborn L'Amour
"It is right noble to fight with wickedness and wrong; the mistake is in supposing that spiritual evil can be overcome by physical means." - Lydia Maria Child