This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our minds, our hearts, and our souls have been fully coded for happiness; all the wiring is built-in. Everyone is capable of finding happiness. All he or she has to do is look for it in the right places… In reality, happy people are the least self-absorbed and self-centered among us… True happiness is not the result of an event, it does not depend on circumstance. You, not what’s going on around you, determine your happiness.
We eventually lose everything we have, yet what ultimately matters can never be lost. Our houses, cars, jobs, and money, our youth and even our loved ones, are just on loan to us… If life is a school, loss is a major part of the curriculum… Our reality here is not permanent; neither is our ownership of anything. Everything is temporary. Trying to find permanence is impossible, and we ultimately learn that there is no safety in trying to “keep” everything. And there is no safety in trying to prevent loss… Loss is often an initiation into adulthood… Loss is a right of passage.
Life | Life | Money | Reality | Right | Youth | Youth | Loss | Learn |
Our power comes from knowing that everything is all right and everyone is unfolding exactly as they are supposed to.
Wisdom consists in the highest use of the intellect for the discernment of the largest moral interest of humanity. It is the most perfect willingness to do the right combined with the utmost attainable knowledge of what is right… Wisdom consists in working for the better from the love of the best.
Better | Discernment | Humanity | Knowledge | Love | Right | Wisdom | Intellect |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
Nobody will every deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves - and the only way they could do that is by not voting.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Life as a sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. Many diverse details have a bearing on the preservation of life, and when we have our eyes on the future we have to engage ourselves in these details. But the only thing that is necessary is to live now, the future is not absolute but ever exposed to accident. Hence it is only the necessity of the immediate present which can justify a wrong action, because not to do the action would in turn be to cause not to do the action would in turn be to commit an offense, indeed the most wrong of all offenses, namely the complete destruction of the embodiment of freedom.
Absolute | Abstract | Accident | Action | Cause | Ends | Example | Freedom | Future | Justify | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Offense | Present | Property | Right | Rights | Self | Self-preservation | Wrong |
There is no divine right of property. Nothing is so completely a man’s own that he may do what he likes with it... Nevertheless, as it is obviously well that each man should labor without fear of being deprived of the use and enjoyment of the product of their labor - as in the nature of things he would not labor at all without some such incentive, it may be said that a man has natural right to own the product of his labor... By this natural right of the individual is still subject to all the limitations imposed by the rights of his fellows.
Enjoyment | Fear | Individual | Labor | Man | Nature | Nothing | Property | Right | Rights |
An honest man feels that he must pay heaven for every hour of happiness with a good spell of hard unselfish work to make others happy. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Good | Happy | Heaven | Man | Right | Wealth | Work | Happiness |
In its deepest sense, the truth is a condition of heart, soul, mind and strength towards God and towards our fellow – not an utterance, not even a right form of words; and therefore such truth coming forth in words is, in a sense, the person that speaks.
God | Heart | Mind | Right | Sense | Soul | Strength | Truth | Words | God |
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.
Duty | Government | Individual | People | Power | Right | Time | Government |
The whole of life and experience goes to show, that right or wrong doing, whether as to the physical or the spiritual nature, is sure in the end to meet its appropriate reward or punishment. Penalties may be delayed but they are sure to come.
Experience | Life | Life | Nature | Punishment | Reward | Right | Wrong |