This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Simcha Zissel of Kelm, fully Rabbi imcha Zissel Ziv Broida, aka the Elder of Kelm
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.
Character | Focus | Goals | Life | Life | World | Happiness |
One of the greatest secrets of success and happiness is always to have something left over.
Alexandre Vinet, fully Alexandre Rodolphe Vinet
Religion finds the love of happiness and the principles of duty separated in us; and its mission - its masterpiece is, to reunite them.
Character | Duty | Love | Mission | Principles | Religion | Happiness |
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.
Contentment | Nature | Pleasure | Present | Qualities | Wisdom | Happiness |
François Arago, fully François Jean Dominique Arago
A time will come when the science of destruction shall bend before the arts of peace; when the genius which multiplies our powers, which creates new products, which diffuses comfort and happiness among the great mass of the people, shall occupy in the general estimation of mankind that rank which reason and common sense now assign to it.
Comfort | Common Sense | Estimation | Genius | Mankind | Peace | People | Rank | Reason | Science | Sense | Time | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |
Hugh Walpole, fully Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole
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.
Capacity | Character | Complacency | Consciousness | Earth | Life | Life | Materialism | Tranquility | World | Happiness |
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.
Action | Beauty | Character | Earth | Heaven | Man | Time | Beauty | Happiness |
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.
Better | Day | Efficiency | Enjoyment | Fun | Life | Life | Wisdom | Happiness |
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.
Character | Desire | Happy | Human nature | Justice | Man | Nature | Reason | Religion | Right | Self | Self-interest | Teach | Happiness |
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.