This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
Accomplishment | Joy | Love | Mistake | Child |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
They had no temples, but they had a real living and uninterrupted sense of oneness with the whole of the universe; they had no creed, but they had a certain knowledge that when their earthly joy had reached the limits of earthly nature, then there would come for them, for the living and for the dead, a still greater fullness of contact with the whole of the universe. They looked forward to that moment with joy, but without haste, not pining for it, but seeming to have a foretaste of it in their hearts, of which they talked to one another.
Happiness is the soul’s joy in the possession of the intangible. Absolute, perfect, continuous happiness in life is impossible for the human. It would mean the consummation of attainments, the individual consciousness of a perfectly fulfilled destiny. Happiness is a paradox because it may coexist with trial, sorrow and poverty. It is the gladness of the heart, rising superior to all conditions… Man might possess everything tangible in the world and yet not be happy, for happiness is the satisfying of the soul, not of the mind or the body.
Consciousness | Individual | Joy | Life | Life | Mind | Paradox | Sorrow | World | Happiness |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
Effort | Happy | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Suffering | Will | Worth |
Every word of tongue is love telling a story to her own ears. Every thought in every mind, she whispers a secret to her own Self. Every vision in every eye, she knows her beauty to her own sight. Every smile on every face, she reveals her own joy for herself to enjoy. Love courses through everything, no, love is everything. How can you say, there is no love, when nothing but Love exists? All that you see has appeared because of Love. All shines from Love, all pulses from Love, all flows from Love - no, once again, all is Love.
Beauty | Joy | Love | Nothing | Smile | Story | Thought | Vision | Beauty | Thought |
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
Mutual caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other's achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.
Achievement | Joy |
There are souls in this world which have the gift of finding joy everywhere and of leaving it behind them when they go.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in attempting; their joy lies in self-constraint: with them asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct.
Asceticism | Joy | Asceticism | Happiness |
No one gives joy or sorrow. ... We gather the consequences of our own deeds.
Consequences | Joy |
To be able to find joy in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.
Joy |
Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
We must face the recognition that what the early Christians saw in Jesus Christ, and what we must accept if we look at him rather than at our imaginations about him, was not a person characterized by universal benignity, loving God and loving man. His love of God and his love of neighbor are two distinct virtues that have no common quality but only a common source. Love of God is adoration of the only true good; it is gratitude to the bestower of all gifts; it is joy in holiness; it is "consent to Being." But the love of man is pitiful rather than adoring; it is giving and forgiving rather than grateful. It suffers for them in their viciousness and profaneness; it does not consent to accept them as they are, but calls them to repentance. The love of God is nonpossessive Eros; the love of man pure Agape; the love of God is passion; the love of man, compassion. There is duality here, but not of like-minded interest in two great values, God and man. It is rather the duality of the Son of Man and Son of God, who loves God as man should love Him, and loves man as only God can love, with powerful pity for those who are foundering.
Duality | Giving | God | Gratitude | Joy | Love | Man | Pity | God |
I Ching, Book of Changes or Zhouyi NULL
Indecision regarding the choice among pleasures temporarily robs a man of inner peace. After due reflection, he attains joy by turning away from the lower pleasures and seeking the higher ones.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
Time is not measured by the years that you live but by the deeds that you do and the joy that you give. And each day as it comes brings a chance to each one to love to the fullest, leaving nothing undone that would brighten the life or lighten the load Of some weary traveler lost on Life's Road. So what does it matter how long we may live if as long as we live we unselfishly give.
Chance | Day | Deeds | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Nothing | Deeds |
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world.
Ignorance | Instinct | Joy | Life | Life | Men | Pessimism | Progress | Struggle |
But there is only one avenue of access to that higher life. It is through a radical purging of inner unreality and the full and final surrender of one's whole self, all that one is and all that one possesses, to the imperious command of the Living God. From that surrender, when complete and unreserved, will follow release from defeat or ennui and the gift of utterly new joy and strength. The old life will be cast away; the old harrowing problems will dissolve; one will stand free from the shackles of temptation, self-consciousness, selfishness; for the first time in one's life, one will know the meaning of spiritual freedom. All that one has heard with the hearing of the ears about the life of religion, all that one has dismissed as the familiar exaggeration of religious propagandists or naïve faith no longer possible for intelligent moderns — all this will come vividly alive within one's own soul. One now knows, with a certainty for which there is no parallel, the truth of religion's claims — the absolutely unique character of the dedicated life, the vivid and continuous awareness of God's presence, the priceless worth of complete fellowship with Him, the service which is perfect freedom.
Awareness | Character | Defeat | Ennui | Exaggeration | Faith | Joy | Life | Life | Meaning | Problems | Service | Surrender | Time | Truth | Unique | Will | Worth | Awareness | Old |