Wislet Help

Source Names.

Sources of Quotes and other forms of Wislet may not have the source name you are thinking of. For example, do you find Buddha under Buddha or Siddhartha Gautama (his birth name), or Prince Siddhartha Gautama (his birth title), or Gautama Buddha, or Prince Gautama?

Do you find Jesus under Jesus Christ (Jesus Christos is the latinised version of his name and subsequent title) , or Joshua of Nazareth (close to his Hebrew name) , or just Christ ( a latin version of his title), or Joshua the Messiah (the ancient Hebrew version)?

Is Shakespeare under Shakespeare, or William Shakespeare, or perhaps even The Bard or The Bard of Avon?

Is King Solomon under Solomon or King Solomon?

We can’t put everyone under every possible name, so you may find it helpful to look at our Name Index to find how we refer to him or her on this site.

The source of some Wislets is Unknown.

And the source of others is Anonymous

While others are Folk

What’s the difference?

‘Unknown’ means there was a person who created that quotation, but we aren’t sure who it was, or who said it first. For example, there are quotations from The Bible, where we don’t know who actually wrote that part of The Bible.

For example, The Book of Proverbs is commonly attributed to King Solomon, but scholars know that he didn’t come up with all those proverbs himself, and certainly didn’t write The Book of Proverbs.

You may find a Proverb listed under Solomon or under Anonymous.

And in some cases we have used the fictional source of a Wislet. For example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, but the phrase, “My dear Watson …” is intimately associated with Sherlock Holmes the fictional character.

Anonymous means it was deliberately written anonymously by someone who didn’t want their name to be known or connected with the statement.

And Folk means it’s folk wisdom from the past, used for a long time, and essentially untraceable. Sometimes we emphasise a particular national or cultural source, such as Turkish Folk, for a saying aphorism that’s particularly associated with Turkey. You can find a list of particular Folk Sources here.

And - yes, in accordance with all good classification systems we have an Other category. We use Other for sources who came up with just one, or perhaps two good quotes in their life. It’s hardly worth giving them an entry to themselves, else we would have thousands of them, so we include them under Other. There’s a list of the sources included under Other here.

Topic Classification

Letting Go v Release

Evil v Lesser Evil

British v American spelling (but see program)

Singular v Plural

Noun v adjective, verb or adverb

Conflicting meanings - Life (experience) v Life (biological) or Book (noun) v Book (verb)

“Loving yourself” not “Loving Yourself” but it’s “Human Nature”, not “Human nature”.