This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.
Caution | Enjoyment | Life | Life | Means | Method | Need | Punishment | Wisdom |
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.
When you praise someone you call yourself his equal.
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
A man can hope for satisfaction and fulfillment only in what he does not yet possess; he cannot find pleasured in something of which he already has too much.
Fulfillment | Hope | Man | Wisdom |
If you are to find rewarding satisfaction in your work, if your life is to be rich and purposeful and crowned with high achievement, it is important you continue to be a growing person. Education is a continuing process. It does not end with the termination of your schooling. Education continues from the beginning of life to the end of life, and balanced growth throughout one's entire life is important for every individual.
Achievement | Beginning | Education | Growth | Important | Individual | Life | Life | Wisdom | Work |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our powers of judgment are more completely exposed by being overpraised than by being unjustly underestimated.
Creativity is a flower that praise brings to bloom, but discouragement often nips in the bud.
Creativity | Praise | Wisdom |
The earnestness of life is the only passport to the satisfaction of life.
Earnestness | Life | Life | Wisdom |
Our material possessions, like our joys, are enhanced in value by being shared. Hoarded and unimproved property can only afford satisfaction to a miser.
Possessions | Property | Wisdom | Value |
The opportunity of making happy is more scarce than we imagine; the punishment of missing it is, never to meet with it again; and the use owe make of it leaves us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance.
Eternal | Happy | Opportunity | Punishment | Repentance | Sentiment | Wisdom |
More people praise the Bible than read it, more read it than understand it, and more understand it than follow it.
Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
“It is not safe to be alone,” nor can all which the cold-hearted, pedant stuns our ears with upon the subject ever give one answer of satisfaction to the mind; in the midst of the loudest vauntings of philosophy, nature will have her yearnings for society and friendship. A good heart wants something to be kind to; and the best parts of our blood, and the purest of our spirits suffer most under the destitution.
Good | Heart | Mind | Nature | Philosophy | Safe | Society | Wants | Will | Wisdom | Yearnings | Society |
Anselm of Canterbury, aka Saint Anselm or Archbishop of Canterbury NULL
Since all justice is rightness, the justice, which brings praise to the one who preserves it, is in nowise in any except rational beings… This justice is not rightness of knowledge, or rightness of action, but rightness of will.
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
All our distinctions are accidental; beauty and deformity, though personal qualities, are neither entitled to praise nor censure; yet it is so happens that they color our opinion of those qualities to which mankind have attached responsibility.
Beauty | Censure | Mankind | Opinion | Praise | Qualities | Responsibility | Wisdom | Beauty |
John Blofeld, fully John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld
The world is full of paradox. For example, [in Buddhism] though no notion of a creator is entertained, great stress is laid upon the need for faith and piety. By faith is meant not trust in a benevolent diety avid for love, praise and obedience, but conviction that beyond the seeming reality misreported by our senses which is inherently unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively perceived, will give our lives undreamed-of meaning and endow the most insignificant object with holiness and beauty.
Beauty | Example | Faith | Love | Meaning | Mystery | Need | Obedience | Object | Paradox | Piety | Praise | Reality | Trust | Will | World |