This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The trouble of the many and various aims of mortal men bring them much care, and herein they go forward by different paths but strive to reach one end, which is happiness. And that good is that, to which if any man attain, he can desire nothing further... Happiness is a state which is made perfect by the union of all good things. This end all men seek to reach, as I said, though by different paths. For there is implanted by nature in the minds of men a desire for the true good; but error leads them astray towards false goods by wrong paths." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
"He who beholds in all beings in the self and the self in all beings, he never turns away from it. When to a man who understands, the self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble can there be to him who once beheld that unity?" - Buddha, Gautama Buddha, or The Buddha, also Gotama Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha and Buddha Śākyamuni NULL
"Thoughts take up no room. When they are right, they afford a portable pleasure, which one may travel with without any; trouble or encumbrance. ," - Jeremy Collier
"How things look on the outside of us depends on how things are on the inside of us. Stay close to the heart of nature and forget his troubled world. Remember, there is nothing wrong with nature, the trouble is in ourselves." - Parks Cousins
"The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds." - Walter Duranty
"We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been its negative character. It has aimed at the repression of faults rather than the creation of virtues." - William H. P. Faunce
"We are 90% alike, all we peoples, and 10% different. The trouble is that we forget the 90% and remember the 10% when we criticize others." - Charles Higham, fully Sir Charles Higham
"Do not trouble another for what you can do yourself." - William Hone
"People always get what they ask for; the only trouble is that they never know, until they get it, what it actually is that they have asked for." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due." - William Ralph Inge
"One of the most useless of all things is to take a deal of trouble in providing against dangers that never come. How many toil to lay up riches which they never enjoy; to provide for exigencies that never happen; to prevent troubles that never come; sacrificing present comfort and enjoyment in guarding against the wants of a period they may never live to see." - William Jay
"Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. Never spend your money before you have earned it. Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap. Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold. We seldom report of having eaten too little. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. How much pain evils have cost us that have never happened! Take things always by the smooth handle. When angry, count ten before you speak, if very angry, count a hundred." - Thomas Jefferson
"Friendliness is contagious. The trouble is, many of us wait to catch it from someone else, when we might better be giving them a chance to catch it from us." - Donald Anderson Laird
"A small trouble is like a pebble. Hold it too close to your eye and it fills the whole world and puts everything out of focus. Hold it at a proper viewing distance and it can be examined and properly classified. Throw it at your feet and it can be seen in its true setting, just one more tiny bump on the pathway to eternity." - Celia Luce
"Luxury makes a man so soft that it is hard to please him, and easy to trouble him; so that his pleasures at last become his burden. Luxury is a nice master, hard to be pleased." - George Mackenzie, fully Sir George Mackenzie. 2nd Baronet, 1st Earl of Cromartie
"In everything the middle course is best: all things in excess bring trouble to men." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL
"Be patient in little things. Learn to bear the every-day trials and annoyances of life quietly and calmly, and then, when unforeseen trouble or calamity comes, your strength will not forsake you. There is much difference between genuine patience and sullen endurance, as between the smile of love, and the malicious gnashing of the teeth." - William Swan Plumer
"Old men grasp more at life than babies, and leave it with much worse grace than young people. It is because all their labours have been for this life, they perceive at last their trouble lost." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"A trouble shared is a trouble halved." - Dorothy Leigh Sayers
"He who is sincere has the easiest task in the world, for, truth being always consistent with itself, he is put to no trouble about his words and actions; it is like traveling on a plain road, which is sure to bring you to your journey's end better than byways in which many lose themselves." - John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
"When to a man who understands, the self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble can there be to him who once beheld that unity?" - Vaga Saneyi Samhita Upanishad
"The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time." - Franklin Pierce Adams, pen name F.P.A.
"Books are no substitute for living, but they can add immeasurably to its richness. When life is absorbing, books can enhance our sense of its significance. When life is difficult, they can give us momentary release from trouble or a new insight into our problems, or provide the hours of refreshment we need." - May Hill Arbuthnot
"The trouble about always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole." - Bernard Augustine DeVoto
"O Youth: Do you know that yours is not the first generation to yearn for a life of beauty and freedom? Do you know that all your ancestors felt as you do - and fell victim to trouble and hatred? Do you know, also, that your fervent wishes can only find fulfillment if you succeed in attaining love and understanding of men, and animals, and plants, and stars, so that every joy becomes your joy and every pain your pain? Open your eyes, your heart, your hands, and avoid the poison your forebears so greedily sucked in from History. Then will all the earth be your fatherland, and all your work and effort spread forth blessings." - Albert Einstein
"We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been at the repression of faults rather than creation of virtues." - William P. Faunce
"If there is to be peace in the world, peace must be established first in every human heart. All the trouble in the world is due to selfishness. It always has been and always will be." - Joseph Francis Flannelly
"The great trouble today is that there are too many people looking for someone else to do something for them. The solution of most of our troubles is to be found in everyone doing something for himself." - Henry Ford
"Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way. That was a true proverb of the wise man, rely upon it; "Better is little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure, and trouble therewith."" - Benjamin Franklin
"One must remember that practically all of us have a number of significant learning disabilities. For example, I am grossly unmusical and cannot carry a tune. We happen to live in a society in which the child who has trouble learning to read is in difficulty. Yet we have all seen dyslexic children who have either superior visual-perception or visual-motor skills. My suspicion would be that in an illiterate society such a child would be in little difficulty and might in fact do better because of his superior visual-perception talents, while many of us who function here might do poorly in a society in which a quite different array of talents was needed in order to be successful. As the demands of society change will we acquire a new group of "minimally brain damaged?"" - Norman Geschwind
"The great trouble with the skepticism of the age is, that it is not thorough enough. It questions everything but its own foundations." - John Monroe Gibson
"A single mind can acquire a fair knowledge of the whole field of science, and find plenty of time to spare for ordinary human affairs. Not many people take the trouble to do so. But without a knowledge of science one cannot understand current events. That is why our modern our modern literature and art are mostly so unreal." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
"To learn the value of money, it is not necessary to know the nice things it can get for you, you have to have experienced the trouble of getting it." - Philippe Hériat, pen name of Raymond-Gerard Payelle
"Riches in their acquisition bring pain and suffering, in their loss manifold trouble and sorrow, in their possession a wild intoxication. How can we say that they confer happiness?" - Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL
"If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility." - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
"Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language." -
"Every area of trouble gives out a ray of hope, and the one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbors." - Rudyard Kipling
"The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time." - Willem de Kooning
"The trouble with our age [twentieth century] is that it is all signpost and no destination." - Louis Kronenberger
"The trouble with research is that it tells you what people were thinking yesterday, not tomorrow. It’s like driving a car using a rearview mirror." - Bernard Loomis
"Society's preservation and man's happiness depend on illusion. Nature itself, which certainly represents the will of God, deludes us in many respects, as when it leads us by the cords of love to reproduce the race. If a youth would consider the trouble in rearing a family, not one in a thousand would marry, but nature closes our eyes to the future (and indeed, wherever popular knowledge rises, the birth rate declines). The same is true of the other passions, which nature utilizes to deceive man and goad them toward the attainment of ends which, when attained, turn out to be but vanity." - Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL
"You can take from a man his worldly belongings... but there is something no conqueror can take from him: that is his mind... Decorate and furnish with love that inner sanctuary of yours. We take a lot of trouble buying the right armchairs, tables and pictures; certainly we should take even more trouble to adorn the invisible walls of our minds." - André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog
"It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken