This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or even seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.
What lies at the end of the process cannot be what ultimately matters. It seems clear that the point is the process itself and the adventure of trying to enrich and up-level that process despite hazards and risks. The point is the game and the playing of it. We are an adventuring universe that is attempting to raise the quality of the adventure. Sometimes succeeding. Sometimes not.
If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others.
Pleasure |
If we had no defects ourselves, we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
War is no longer a lively adventure or expedition into romance, matching man against man in the test of the stout-hearted. Instead, it is aimed against the cities mankind has built. Its goal is their total destruction and devastation.
Almost everyone takes pleasure in returning small obligations; many are grateful for moderate ones; but there is scarcely anyone who has anything but ingratitude for great ones.
Ingratitude | Pleasure |
The pleasure of love is in loving. We are happier in the passing we feel than in that we inspire.
Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses. If short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one. If it be His pleasure that you should act a poor man, see that you act it well; or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen. For this is your business to act well the given part; but to choose it, belongs to another.
The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless.
Pleasure |
Virtue is the one thing without which pleasure cannot be.
We say that pleasure is the starting-point and the end of living blissfully. For we recognize pleasure as a good which is primary and innate. We begin every act of choice and avoidance from pleasure, and it is to pleasure that we return using our experience as the criterion of every good thing.
Choice | Experience | Good | Pleasure |
The flesh believes that pleasure is limitless and that it requires unlimited time; but the mind, understanding the end and limit of the flesh and ridding itself of fears of the future, secures a complete life and has no longer any need for unlimited time.
Future | Life | Life | Mind | Need | Pleasure | Time | Understanding |
If we had no motivation to be preoccupied with our sensations, the impressions that objects made on us would pass like shadows, and leave no trace. After several years, we would be the same as we were at our first moment, without having acquired any knowledge, and without having any other faculties than feeling. But the nature of our sensations does not let us remain enslaved in this lethargy. Since they are necessarily agreeable or disagreeable, we are involved in seeking the former, avoiding the latter; and the greater the intensity of difference between pleasure and pain, the more it occasions action in our souls. Thus the privation of an object that we judge necessary for our well-being, gives us disquiet, that uneasiness we call need, and from which desires are born. These needs recur according to circumstances, often quite new ones present themselves, and it is in this way that our knowledge and faculties develop.
Action | Circumstances | Knowledge | Lethargy | Nature | Need | Object | Pain | Pleasure | Present |
Some men think that the gratification of curiosity is the end of knowledge; some the love of fame; some the pleasure of dispute; some the necessity of supporting themselves by their knowledge; but the real use of all knowledge is this, that we should dedicate that reason which was given us by God to the use and advantage of man.
Curiosity | Dispute | Fame | God | Knowledge | Love | Man | Men | Necessity | Pleasure | Reason | God | Think |
No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth.
But no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth.