Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Thomas Jefferson

Without virtue happiness cannot be.

Character | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |

Max Horkheimer

Good will, solidarity and wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today’s martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the after-life but the happiness of men who come after them for whom they know how to die.

Action | Better | Character | Good | Immortality | Life | Life | Martyrs | Men | Patience | Struggle | Will | World | Happiness |

David Hume

Delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion; it enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pain as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.

Character | Mankind | Pain | Passion | Rest | Taste | Happiness |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

If you had been looking for happiness in people and events, you discovered that it is not there. If you look to outer circumstances for your satisfaction cues, you will stay on an emotion seesaw... True joy is actually part of your nature... Events merely give us an excuse to feel it.

Character | Circumstances | Events | Joy | Nature | People | Will | Happiness |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

Consumption, celebrity and the quest for perfection in this world are all subject to the law of diminishing returns: each successive acquisition and achievement will mean less than the one before. Diminishing returns are finally leading to diminished expectations about the promise of finding happiness without caring for our souls. Perhaps we are now ready to reject the hucksters of materialisms that have lured us down so many dead ends, and start again on the road that will lead us back to God.

Achievement | Character | Ends | God | Law | Perfection | Promise | Will | World | Happiness |

David Hume

Human happiness seems to consists in three ingredients: action, pleasure and indolence. And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the disposition of the person, yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting without destroying in some measure the relish of the whole composition.

Action | Character | Indolence | Pleasure | Happiness |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

It is our daily duty to consider that in all circumstances of life, pleasurable, painful, or otherwise, the conduct of every human being affects, more or less, the happiness of others, especially of those in the same house; and that, as life is made up, for the most part, not of great occasions, but of small everyday moments, it is the giving to those moments their greatest amount of peace, pleasantness, and security, that contributes most to the sum of human good. Be peaceable. Be cheerful. Be true.

Character | Circumstances | Conduct | Duty | Giving | Good | Life | Life | Peace | Security | Happiness |

Narciso Irala

Happiness is not found, it is made. One can only give the seed of happiness to another. Each one must make it grow within himself.

Character | Happiness |

Victor Hugo

The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather loved in spite of ourselves.

Character | Life | Life | Happiness |

William James

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease.

Character | Disease | Success | Worship |

Marina Horner

There is a vigilance and judgment about trifles which men only get by living in a creed; and those are the trifles of detail, on which the success of execution depends.

Character | Creed | Judgment | Men | Success | Trifles | Vigilance |

Thomas Jefferson

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

Character | Power | Happiness |

William James

The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success is our national disease.

Character | Disease | Success | Worship |

David Hume

In this sullen apathy neither true wisdom nor true happiness can be found.

Apathy | Character | Wisdom | Happiness |

Thomas Jefferson

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.

Chance | Character | Conscience | Freedom | Good | Health | Life | Life | Occupation | Happiness |

Ya’akov Dov "Katzele" Katz

The goal of overcoming the demand for gratifying desires is not to deny oneself pleasure, but to try to keep desires in a perspective that will allow us to overcome them because of a realization that our happiness is not dependent on them.

Character | Pleasure | Will | Happiness |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

An eternal happiness is a security for which there is no longer any market value in the speculative nineteenth century; at the very most it may be used by the gentlemen of the clerical profession to swindle rural innocents.

Character | Eternal | Security | Happiness | Value |