This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is a mistake to base one’s hopes for happiness upon the enforcement of security and equality. In principle, both desires are insatiable... No individual or society is secure in a world of emergent probability and sin... To exercise liberty is to take risks, to embrace uncertainties." - Michael Novak
"The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet." - José Joaquín de Olmedo, fully José Joaquín de Olmedo y Maruri
"The fact is that we can find happiness only in serving others. Just as a car is designed to move, so is a man designed to serve. And if he looks for happiness in anything other than service and sacrifice, he will always be disappointed." - Harold Oxley
"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. " - Thomas Paine
"As nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm, so happiness or peace of mind cannot be achieved without sharing oneself with others, serving those in need, whether materially or spiritually." - Martha Pingel
"To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Soul’s expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is Happiness." - Plotinus NULL
"The habit of dissipating every serious thought by a succession of agreeable sensations is as fatal to happiness as to virtue; for when amusement is uniformly substituted for objects of moral and mental interest, we lose all that elevates our enjoyments above the scale of childish pleasures." - Anna Maria Porter
"It depends on education to open the gates which lead to virtue or to vice, to happiness or to misery." - Jane Porter
"It is no happiness to live long, nor unhappiness to die soon; happy is he that hath lived long enough to die well." - Francis Quarles
"The great comprehensive truths, written in letters of living light on every page of our history, are these: Human happiness has no perfect security but freedom; freedom, none but virtue; virtue, none but knowledge; and neither freedom nor virtue has any vigor or immortal hope except the principles of the Christian faith..." - James H. Aughey
"The small share of happiness attainable by man exists only insofar as he is able to cease to think of himself." - Theodor Reik
"A person who makes his happiness dependent on material or physical pleasures will never be guaranteed happiness. There is always something that might happen to destroy his happiness and success. The only guarantee for happiness is to find happiness in spiritual growth." - Moshe Rosenstein, fully Moshe ben Chaim Rosenstein
"When fate is adverse, a wise man can always strive for happiness and sail against the wind to attain it." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"I must accept life unconditionally. Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition." - Arthur Rubenstein
"I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive... But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting." -
"There is no greater fool than one who makes his happiness based on receiving honor and approval. Such a person’s happiness is always in the hands of others... Such a person is dependent on other people his enter life and will frequently suffer humiliation. Only an idiot would knowingly and willingly put himself in a situation where he will constantly be in need of others and will humiliate himself for a dubious and questionable benefit." - Avraham-Haim Shag, born Avraham-Haim Tzvebner
"Our principles are the springs of our actions; our actions, the springs of our happiness or misery. Too much care, therefore, cannot be taken in forming our principles." - Philip Skelton
"Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human [mortal] life." - Alexander Smith
"Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life." - Alexander Smith
"When a men is happy, every effort to express his happiness mars its completeness." - Alexander Smith
"Extreme happiness invites religion almost as much as extreme misery." - Dodie Smith, fully Dorothy Gladys "Dodie" Smith
"Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence." - Sydney Smith
"Never teach false modesty. How exquisitely absurd to teach a girl that beauty is of no value, dress of no use! Beauty is of value; her whole prospects and happiness in life may often depend upon a new gown or a becoming bonnet: if she has five grains of common sense she will find this out. The great thing is to teach her their proper value." - Sydney Smith
"Of all the sights which can soften and humanize the heart of men, there is none that ought so surely to reach it as that of innocent children, enjoying the happiness which is their proper and natural portion." - Robert Southey
"It is... most profitable to us in life to make perfect the intellect or reason as far as possible, and in this one thing consists the highest happiness or blessedness of man; for blessedness is nothing but the peace of mind which springs from the intuitive knowledge of God, and to perfect the intellect is nothing but to understand god, together with the attributes and actions of God, which flow from the necessity of His nature. The final aim, therefore, of a man who is guided by reason, that is to say, the chief desire by which he strives to govern all his other desires, is that by which he is led adequately to conceive himself and all things which can be conceived by his intelligence." -
"No true and permanent fame can be founded, except in labors which promote the happiness of mankind." - Charles Sumner
"What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found the courage to say that there is none." - William Graham Sumner
"Men of the noblest dispositions think themselves happiest when others share their happiness with them." - Jeremy Taylor
"Even granting the author [Rutherford]... his main principle, ‘That every man’s own happiness is the ultimate end, which nature and reason teach him to pursue’, why may not nature and reason teach him, too, to have some desire to see others happy as well as himself, or give him some delight in doing what seems fit and right, if these things do not interfere with his own happiness?... Why may he not, with the pursuit of that end, join some other pursuits not inconsistent with it, instead of transforming every benevolent affection, every moral view, into self-interest? This surely neither does honour to religion, nor justice to human nature." - Catharine Trotter Cockburn
"Man is to know himself, and with full command of his conditions and unlimited time for action, is not only to soar toward, but absolutely attain to heights of being and of beauty hitherto undreamed of, and bringing fairly within his realization a heaven on earth, in true grandeur and happiness as far transcending the heaven of the orthodox Christian as that heaven transcends the heaven of the savage." - Paul Tyner
"Religion finds the love of happiness and the principles of duty separated in us; and its mission - its masterpiece is, to reunite them." - Alexandre Vinet, fully Alexandre Rodolphe Vinet
"I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to life in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not over anxious about your personal place; that makes you tolerant because you realize your own comic fallibility; that gives you tranquillity without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself." - Hugh Walpole, fully Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole
"He that has a "spirit of detail" will do better in life than many who figured beyond him in the university. Such an one is minute and particular. He adjusts trifles; and these trifles compose most of the business and happiness of life. Great events happen seldom, and affect few; trifles happen every moment to everybody; and though one occurrence of them adds little to the happiness or misery of life, yet the sum total of their continual repetition is of the highest consequence." - Daniel Webster
"It is only in the stillness and simplicity of presence - when we are aware of what we are experiencing, when we are here with it as it unfolds - that we can really appreciate our life and reconnect with the ordinary magic of being alive on this earth... Our life is unsatisfactory only because we are not living it fully, because instead we are pursuing a happiness that is always somewhere else, other than where we are right now." - John Welwood
"Men's happiness springs mainly from moderate troubles, which afford the mind a healthful stimulus, and are followed by a reaction which produces a cheerful flow of spirits." - Edward Wigglesworth
"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." - Hillel Witkind
"One should seek virtue for its own sake and not from hope or fear, or any external motive. It is in virtue that happiness consists, for virtue is the state of mind which tends to make the whole of life harmonious." - Zeno of Citium NULL
"When a person focuses on the goals of his life, he is able to overcome the difficulties involved. When one’s focus is on olam haboh [world-to-come], he lives in a state of happiness even though he experiences many inconveniences along his relatively short trip." - Simcha Zissel of Kelm, fully Rabbi imcha Zissel Ziv Broida, aka the Elder of Kelm
"One of the greatest secrets of success and happiness is always to have something left over." - George Matthew Adams
"That one who does not get fun and enjoyment out of every day in which he lives, needs to reorganize his life. And the sooner the better, for pure enjoyment throughout life has more to do with one's happiness and efficiency than almost any other single element." - George Matthew Adams
"We are always looking for pleasure, frantically seeking happiness in many ways, and totally missing the simplest, most fundamental pleasure, which actually is also the greatest pleasure: just being here. When we are really present, the presence itself is made out of fullness, contentment and blissful pleasure... Happiness, value, and pleasure are not he result of anything. These qualities are part of our fundamental nature." - Ali Hameed Almaas