This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Complete happiness will not come to one’s soul through gratifying physical desires. The only way to achieve perfect happiness is to find spiritual fulfillment which leads to being satisfied with one’s material situation.
Character | Fulfillment | Soul | Will | Happiness |
Beaumont and Fletcher, Francis Beaumont (c.1585-1614) and John Fletcher
Is there no constancy in earthy things? No happiness in us, but what must alter? No life, without the heavy load of fortune? What miseries we are, and to ourselves? Ev’n then when full content seems to sit by us, what daily sores and sorrows.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley
Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
It is a paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self. As a matter of experience, we find that true happiness comes in seeking other things, in the manifold activities of life, in the healthful outgoing of all human powers.
Experience | Life | Life | Paradox | Pleasure | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Wisdom | Happiness |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict.
Doubt | Effort | Energy | Evolution | Life | Life | Power | Will | Wisdom | Work | World |
Search for a single, inclusive good is doomed to failure. Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning.
Experience | Failure | Good | Life | Life | Meaning | Search | Unique | Wisdom | Happiness |
Arnold Bennett, fully Enoch Thomas Arnold Bennett
You have to live on twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness - the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends! - depends on that!
Evolution | Health | Money | Pleasure | Respect | Right | Soul | Time | Wisdom | Happiness |
J.M. Barrie, fully Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.
When a thief is breaking into a house, he calls on God to help him.
It is the constant and determined effort that breaks down all resistance, sweeps away all obstacles.
Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
Body | Health | Individual | Liberty | Man | Pleasure | Society | Wisdom | Happiness |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.
Art | Cause | Effort | Ideas | Man | Nature | Power | Wisdom |