This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men in history." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes." - Chinese Proverbs
"He who wishes to secure the good of others, has already secured his own." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"One great difference between a wise man and a fool is: the former only wishes for what he may possibly obtain; the latter desires impossibilities." - Democritus NULL
"One great difference between a wise man and a fool is, the former only wishes for what he may possibly obtain; the latter desires impossibilities." - Democritus NULL
"He is a truly virtuous man who wishes always to be open to the observation of honest men." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expense, and my expense is equal to my wishes." - Edward Gibbon
"Wishes cost you nothing unless you want them to come true." - Frank Tyger
"Know what work you want to do and go after it. The young man who gets ahead must decide for himself what he wishes to do. From his own tastes, his own enthusiasm, how he must get the motive and the inspiration which are to start him on his way to a successful life." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season." -
"A teacher should, above all things, first induce a desire in the pupil for the acquisition he wishes to impart." - Horace Mann
"The notion of happiness is so indefinite that although every man wishes to attain it yet he never can say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills." - Immanuel Kant
"The notion of happiness is so indefinite that although every man wishes to attain it, yet he never can say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills. The reason of this is that all the elements which belong to the notion of happiness are altogether empirical, i.e., they must be borrowed from experience, and nevertheless the idea of happiness requires an absolute whole, a maximum of welfare in my present and all future circumstances." - Immanuel Kant
"A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman of the next generation. A politician looks for the success of his party; a statesman for that of his country. The statesman wishes to steer, while the politician is satisfied to drift." - James Freeman Clarke
"Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are... The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves, it is our very self. Man is manacled only by himself: thought and action are the jailers of Fate - they imprison, being base; they are also the angels of Freedom - they liberate, being noble. Not what a man wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns." -
"When crime wishes to attack innocence, it can always find a pretext for doing so." - Jean de La Fontaine
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." - John Adams
"The Church’s own littleness is the key to its greatness. God wishes to show that man’s salvation is His work, and not man’s." - John LaFarge
"Customs are made for customary circumstances and customary characters... The mind itself is bowed to the yoke; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own." - John Stuart Mill
"He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth." - José Ortega y Gasset
"He who wishes to lead a movement must conduct a fight on two fronts – against those who lag behind and those who rush ahead." - Joseph Stalin, fully Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, born Loseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili
"Every fool thinks that life is there for his sake alone, and as though nothing existed but he. And so, when anything happens that opposes his wishes, he concludes that the whole universe is evil. But if man would regard the whole universe itself and realize what an infinitesimal part he plays in it, the truth would be clear and apparent to him." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Every ignoramus imagines that all that exists, exists with a view to his individual sake; it is as if there were nothing that exists except him. And if something happens to him that is contrary to what he wishes, he makes the trenchant judgment that all exists is an evil." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"The word of him who wishes to speak with men without speaking with God is not fulfilled; but the word of him who wishes to speak with God without speaking with men goes astray." - Martin Buber
"When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"The greatest and highest truths have no outward image of themselves visible to man, which he who wishes to satisfy the soul of the inquirer can adapt to the eye of sense, and therefore we ought to train ourselves to give and accept a rational account of them; for immaterial things, which are the noblest and greatest, are shown only in thought and idea, and in no other way." - Plato NULL
"Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Americans are like a rich parent who wishes he knew how to give his child the hardships that made him rich." - Robert Frost
"The wise man is free, since one who does as he wishes is free. Because he does what he wishes, the free man is wise. One who acts with wisdom has nothing to fear, for fear lives in sin. Where there is no fear there is liberty; where there is liberty there is power of doing what one wishes. Therefore, only the wise man is free." - Saint Ambrose, born Aurelius Ambrosius NULL
"Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable, renascent errors." - Charles Pierre Péguy
"In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue. Both systems are developing into managerial societies, their inhabitants well fed, well clad, having their wishes satisfied, and not having wishes that cannot be satisfied. Men are increasingly automatons, who make machines which act like men and produce men who act like machines; there reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"There is one wish ruling over all mankind, and it is a wish which is never in any single instance granted - each man wishes to be his own master. It is a boy's beautific vision, and it remains the grown-up man's ruling passion to the last. But the fact is, life is a service; the only question is, whom will we serve?" - Frederick William Faber
"Exercise is done against one's wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse." - George Sheehan
"Destiny has two ways of crushing us - by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them. " - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL
"That capacity to understand life comes into being only when one understands relationship. Relationship is a mirror. It must reflect, not as one wishes oneself to be, ideally or romantically, but what one actually is, and it is very difficult to perceive oneself as one actually is because one is so accustomed to escaping from what is; it is arduous to perceive, to observe silently what is, because one is so used to condemning, justifying, comparing, identifying. And in that process of justification, condemnation, that which is, is not understood. Only in the understanding of what is is there freedom from what is." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are... The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves, it is our very self. Man is manacled only by himself: thought and action are the jailers of Fate - they imprison, being base; they are also the angels of Freedom - they liberate, being noble. Not what a man wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns." - James Allen
"Life is about exploration, about experience, and the purpose of life may very well be experience. God wishes to experience life through you." - Jean Houston
"The apparently irreconcilable dissimilarity between our wishes and our means, between our hearts and this world, remains a riddle. " - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"However many blessings we expect from God, His infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts." - John Calvin
"If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark." - John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”