This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
J. W. Fulbright, fully James William Fulbright
In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest.
Enjoyment | Example | Freedom | People | Society | World | Society |
It is by union with his will that one enjoys and possesses God,and it is an illusion to seek for that enjoyment by any other means. The will of God is the universal means. This means does not belong to this or that method, but it has the virtue of sanctifying all methods and special calls.
Enjoyment | God | Illusion | Means | Virtue | Virtue | Will | God |
John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
In our pursuit of the things of this world, we usually prevent enjoyment by expectation; we anticipate our happiness, and eat out the heart and sweetness of worldly pleasures by delightful forethoughts of them; so that when we come to possess them, they do not answer the expectation, or satisfy the desires which were raised about them, and they vanish into nothing.
John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
Man counts happiness in a thousand shapes; and the faster he follows it the swifter it flies from him. Almost everything promiseth happiness to us at a distance, but when we come nearer, either we fall short of it, or it falls short of our expectation; and it is hard to say which of there is the greatest disappointment. Our hopes are usually bigger than the enjoyment can satisfy; and an evil long feared, besides that it may never come, is many times more painful and troublesome than the evil itself when it comes.
Piety, finally, is allegiance to the will of God. Whether that will is understood or not, it is accepted as good and holy, and is obeyed in faith. Life is a mandate, not the enjoyment of an annuity; a task, not a game; a command, not a favor.
True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Conversation | Enemy | Enjoyment | Friendship | Happiness |
Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence…Republics are created by the virture, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.
Blessings | Enjoyment | Intelligence | Order | Posterity | Public | Wise | Youth | Youth |
Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
Let this be understood, then, at starting; that the patient conquest of difficulties which rise in the regular and legitimate channels of business and enterprise is not only essential in securing the success which you seek but it is essential to that preparation of your mind, requisite for the enjoyment of your successes, and for retaining them when gained. So, day by day, and week by week; so month after month, and year after year, work on, and in that progress gain in strength and symmetry, and nerve and knowledge, that when success, patiently and bravely worked for, shall come, it may find you prepared to receive it and keep it.
Business | Conquest | Day | Enjoyment | Progress | Receive | Strength | Success | Work | Business |
How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we may now expect to see, not only in theory and in books but in actual practice, calculated for the general good, and taking no more upon it than the general good requires, leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with men's notions concerning God, and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine.
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
People must learn that the accumulation of wealth by the successful conduct of business is the corollary of the improvement of their own standard of living and vice versa. They must realize that bigness in business is not an evil, but both the cause and effect of the fact that they themselves enjoy all those amenities whose enjoyment is called the “American way of life.
Business | Cause | Enjoyment | Improvement | Wealth | Business | Learn | Vice |
All pleasure is social…It springs from alienation. Even when enjoyment is ignorant of the prohibition it infringes, it owes its origin to civilization, to the fixed order from which it yearns to return to the very nature from which that order protects it. Only when dream absolves them of the compulsion of work, of the individual’s attachment to a particular social function and finally to a self, leading back to a primal state free of domination and discipline, do human beings feel the magic of pleasure…Thought arose in the course of liberation from terrible nature, which is finally subjugated utterly. Pleasure, so to speak, is nature’s revenge. In it human beings divest themselves of thought, escape from civilization. In earlier societies such home-coming was provided by communal festivals. Primitive orgies are the collective origin of pleasure.
In this society there is no longer any sphere in which domination can profess its contradictions,, as it does in art; there is no longer any means of duplication by which the distortion might be expressed. But in earlier times such expression was called not only beauty but thought, intellect, language itself. Today language calculates, designates, betrays, initiates death; it does not express…Intellectual enjoyment used to be confined to the presentation of suffering, but they play horror itself.
Beauty | Enjoyment | Language | Means | Play | Society | Society | Beauty |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Anyone who has experienced flow knows that the deep enjoyment it provides requires an equal degree of disciplined concentration.
Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
The one grasp Reality piecemeal, the other grasps it in its wholeness. The one fixes its gaze on the eternal the other on the temporal aspect of Reality. The one is present enjoyment of the whole of Reality; the other aims at traversing the whole by slowly specifying and closing up the various regions of the whole for exclusive observation. Both are in need of each other for mutual rejuvenation. Both seek vision of the same reality, which reveals itself to them in accordance to the function of life. In fact, intuition, as Bergson rightly says, is only a higher kind of intellect.
Aims | Enjoyment | Eternal | Need | Present | Reality | Vision |
Only the savage, like an animal, clings to the enjoyment of the •present moment.
To preserve an unclouded capacity for the enjoyment of life is an unusual moral and psychological achievement. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the prerogative of mindlessness, but the exact opposite: It is the reward of self-esteem.
Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
Anyone who relies too heavily on reason to achieve happiness, who analyses it, who, so to speak, quibbles over his enjoyment and can accept only refined pleasures, ends up not having any at all. He's like a man who wants to get rid of all the lumps in his mattress and eventually ends up sleeping on bare boards.