This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
But no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth.
Frederick II, `Frederick the Great’ NULL
The greatest and noblest pleasure we have in this world is to discover new truths, and the next is to shake off old prejudices... A man who seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions.
Art | Consciousness | Crime | Emotions | Eternal | Experience | Heart | Imagination | Inspiration | Man | Men | Mind | Misfortune | Nature | Opinion | Perception | Pleasure | Power | Present | Sense | Soul | Thought | Wickedness | Misfortune | Art | Thought |
Play not for gain, but sport; who plays for more than he can lose with pleasure stakes his heart.
That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but is use is to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to dance is not rendered ironical because the danced cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so. what is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.
Cause | Death | Enough | Illusion | Impulse | Life | Life | Nature | Object | People | Pleasure | Sound | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
Love is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of the impending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains nevertheless only a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins presently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship into partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half plaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its consequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclination we have woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices, bearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which once seemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortal career. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. He sails henceforth for one point of the compass.
Consequences | Destiny | Habit | Inclination | Life | Life | Love | Man | Mortal | Mystery | Passion | Pleasure | Promise | Work | Learn |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it. As long as there is the enthusiasm of the chase they enjoy it. But when they begin to look around and think of settling down, they find that that part by which joy enters in, is dead in them. They have spent their lives in heaping up colossal piles of treasure, which stand at the end, like the pyramids in the desert, holding only the dust of things.
Enthusiasm | Joy | Men | Pleasure | Receive | Wealth | Think |
We have to understand the world can only be grasped by an action, not by contemplation. . . . The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. . . . The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Action | Better | Contemplation | Man | Mind | Pleasure | Skill | World | Understand |
None has more frequent conversations with a disagreeable self than the man of pleasure; his enthusiasms are but few and transient; his appetites, like angry creditors, are continually making fruitless demands for what he is unable to pay; and the greater his former pleasures, the more strong his regret, the more impatient his expectations. A life of pleasure is, therefore, the most unpleasing life.
Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, Pain and Pleasure - they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think; every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.
Effort | Government | Mankind | Nature | Pain | Pleasure | Will | Government | Govern |
High art, high morals, high faith, are impossible among those who do not believe their own inspirations, but only court them for pleasure or profit.
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
The test of pleasure is the memory it leaves behind.
The secret pleasure of a generous act is the great mind’s great bribe.
The secret pleasure of a generous act is the great mind's bribe.
John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
All pleasure must be bought at the price of pain. The difference between false and true pleasure is this; for the true, the price is paid before you enjoy it; for the false, after you enjoyed it.
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, utility, or the Great Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness... Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.
Creed | Ends | Freedom | Pain | Pleasure | Right | Wrong | Happiness |