This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
Freedom | Individual |
Howard Cosell, fully Howard William Cosell, born Howard William Cohen
The ultimate victory in competition is derived from the inner satisfaction of knowing that you have done your best and that you have gotten the most out of what you had to give.
Competition | Knowing |
It may be obvious that this world has not been made merely for the ease and happiness of men, and obvious that we are not made to inhabit an earthly paradise, but the human heart can never cease to long for satisfaction of desire. This primal need has been the driving power to transform society and to improve the conditions of life. Even when men miss happiness as an experience, they feel they were made for it. The capacity for joy, which is their natural human instinct, demands fruition. To ask them to abandon the quest for happiness and to acknowledge it a phantom would be to make a mock of life.
Capacity | Heart | Men | Need | Power | Society | World | Society | Happiness |
Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love. Love is never security; love is a state in which there is no desire to be secure; it is a state of vulnerability; it is the only state in which exclusiveness, enmity and hate are impossible.
It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.
J. L. Austin, fully John Langshaw Austin
But I owe it to the subject to say, that it has long afforded me what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of - the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.
Fun | Philosophy |
Because gratification of a desire leads to the temporary stilling of the mind and the experience of the peaceful, joyful Self, it's no wonder that we get hooked on thinking that happiness comes from the satisfaction of desires. This is the meaning of the old adage, Joy is not in things, it is in us.
Desire | Experience | Joy | Meaning | Mind | Thinking | Wonder | Happiness | Old |
Life passes on in proximity to the sacred, and it is this proximity that endows existence with ultimate significance. In our relation to the immediate we touch upon the most distant. Even the satisfaction of physical needs can be a sacred act. Perhaps the essential meaning of Judaism is that in doing the finite we may perceive the infinite.
Happiness is not a synonym for self-satisfaction, complacency, or smugness. Self-satisfaction breeds futility and despair. All that is creative in man stems from a seed of endless discontent. New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. The aim is the maintenance and fanning of a discontent with our aspirations and achievements, the maintenance and fanning of a craving that knows no satisfaction. Man’s true fulfillment depends upon communion with that which transcends him.
Discontent | Fulfillment | Insight | Looks | Man |
Consumers’ satisfaction supplies the social meaning for all [capitalist] economic activity.
Meaning |
As this world was not intended to be a state of any great satisfaction or high enjoyment, so neither was it intended to be a mere scene of unhappiness and sorrow.
Unhappiness | World |
We must always start from the satisfaction of wants, since they are the end of all production.
Krishna, also Kreeshna, Krsna, Lord Krishna NULL
Hypocritical, proud, and arrogant, living in delusion and clinging to their deluded ideas, insatiable in their desires, they pursue unclean ends… Bound on all sides by scheming and anxiety, driven by anger and greed, they amass by any means they can a hoard of money for the satisfaction of their cravings… Self-important, obstinate, swept away by the pride of wealth, they ostentatiously perform sacrifices without any regard for their purpose. Egotistical, violent, arrogant, lustful, angry, envious of everyone, they abuse my presence within their own bodies and in the bodies of others.
Lawrence Durrell, fully Lawrence George Durrell
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
Religion is man's way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. That it is not an inevitable defeat is a claim that cannot be defended in good faith. One can, of course, disperse one's life over the contingencies of every day, but even then it is only a ceaseless and desperate desire to live, and finally a regret that one has not lived. One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is a sense beyond that which is inherent in human history -- if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred. A hypothetical world from which the sacred had been swept away would admit of only two possibilities: vain fantasy that recognizes itself as such, or immediate satisfaction which exhausts itself. It would leave only the choice proposed by Baudelaire, between lovers of prostitutes and lovers of clouds: those who know only the satisfactions of the moment and are therefore contemptible, and those who lose themselves in otiose imaginings , and are therefore contemptible. Everything is contemptible, and there is no more to be said. The conscience liberated from the sacred knows this, even if it conceals it from itself.
Choice | Conscience | Defeat | Desire | Good | History | Inevitable | Life | Life | Order | Regret | Sacred | Sense | World |
Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein
I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change. I have grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective not from the stand point of my personal fate. To understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one's own place – that is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, it is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for a man who does not limit his tasks to the present day.
Duty | Events | Impatience | Man | Present | Will | Understand |
One great satisfaction must be wanting to those who have been blessed with uninterrupted happiness, the consciousness of that happiness arising from reflection upon it.
Consciousness | Reflection | Blessed | Happiness |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
No people ever did or ever can attain a worthy civilization by the satisfaction merely of material needs.
Civilization | People |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born /a hundred million years /and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
Absence | Desire | Longing | Opportunity | Sense |