This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.
But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
Day | Death | Insight | Little | Man | Method | Mind | Patience | Psychology | Style | Success | Superiority | Tenacity | Thought | Uncertainty | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Thought |
Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things.
Evil | Good | Man | Melancholy | Reality | Thought | Happiness | Thought |
It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.
Resignation | Stoic | Universe | Happiness |
William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.
O breath of public praise, short liv'd and vain! oft gain'd without desert, as often lost, unmerited; composed but of extremes: Thou first beginn'st with love enthusiastic, madness of affection; then (Bounding o'er moderation and o'er reason) Thou turn'st to hate, as causeless and as fierce.
Success |
William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
If he was not commonplace, it was through nothing remarkable in his mind, which was simply clear and practical, but through some combination of qualities of the heart that made men trust him, and women call him sweet--a word of theirs which conveys otherwise indefinable excellences.
Appreciation | Good | Knowledge | Nothing | Will | Appreciation | Happiness |
Read whatever chapter of Scripture you will, and be ever so delighted with it -- yet it will leave you as poor, as empty and unchanged as it found you unless it has turned you wholly and solely to the Spirit of God, and brought you into full union with and dependence upon Him.
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
Success |
When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
Mind | Nature | Order | Religion | Sacrifice | Surrender | Happiness |
It is profit which draws men into enormous unmanageable aggregations called towns, for instance; profit which crowds them up when they are there into quarters without gardens or open spaces; profit which won’t take the most ordinary precautions against wrapping a whole district in a cloud of sulphurous smoke; which turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers, which condemns all but the rich to live in houses idiotically cramped and confined at the best, and at the worst in houses for whose wretchedness there is no name