This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Retribution is one of the grand principles in the divine administration of human affairs; a requital is imperceptible only to the willfully unobservant. There is everywhere the working of the everlasting law of requital; man always gets as he gives.
Administration | Law | Man | Principles | Wisdom |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
If I were asked what single qualification was necessary for one who has the care of children, I should say patience - patience with their tempers, with their understandings, with their progress. It is not brilliant parts or great acquirements which are necessary for teachers, but patience to go over first principles again and again; steadily to add a little every day; never to be irritated by willful or accidental hindrance.
Care | Children | Day | Little | Patience | Principles | Progress | Wisdom |
Profit is a by-product of work; happiness is its chief product.
Aristotle said that all creative people are dissatisfied because they are looking for happiness in perfection and seeking for things that do not exist. This is one of the hopes of the world. There is no progress where people are satisfied. Discontent is perhaps the most potent challenge to improvement.
Challenge | Discontent | Improvement | People | Perfection | Progress | Wisdom | World | Happiness |
Tracing the progress of mankind in the ascending path of civilization, and moral and intellectual culture, our fathers found that the divine ordinance of government, in every stage of ascent, was adjustable on principles of the common reason to the actual condition of a people, and always had for its objects, in the benevolent councils of the divine wisdom, the happiness, the expansion, the security, the elevation of society, and the redemption of man. They sought in vain for any title of authority of man over man, except of superior capacity and higher morality.
Authority | Capacity | Civilization | Culture | Government | Man | Mankind | Morality | People | Principles | Progress | Reason | Redemption | Security | Society | Title | Wisdom |
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, also called Bernard de Bouyer
A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipate too great a happiness.
Anyone who starts out to chase happiness will find it running away from him. We get happiness by indirection.
David Gardner, fully David Pierpont Gardner
Success is getting what you want, happiness is getting what you get.
Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history of the human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have always preceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be accelerated by the folly and madness of our rulers. If the people are discontented, the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by instituting rigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs and conciliating their affections. Courts of justice, indeed, may be called in to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of their proceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence to the nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, and become the partial instruments of vexatious oppression. Whatever may become of me, my principles will last forever. Individuals may perish; but truth is eternal. The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from every quarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempest and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil.
Aid | Discontent | Era | Eternal | Folly | Freedom | History | Madness | People | Principles | Purity | Reverence | Truth | Tyranny | Will | Wisdom |
The true greatness and the true happiness of a country consist in wisdom; in that enlarged an comprehensive wisdom which includes education, knowledge, religion, virtue, freedom, with every influence which advances and every institution which supports them.
Education | Freedom | Greatness | Influence | Knowledge | Religion | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Happiness |
George Gissing, fully George Robert Gissing
I have the happiness of the passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.