This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 4th Baronet, Sir John Lubbock
Don't be afraid of showing affection. Be warm and tender, thoughtful and affectionate. Men are more helped by sympathy than by service. Love is more than money, and a kind word will give more pleasure than a present.
To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again... Every moment is a new arrival, a new bestowal. How to welcome the moment? How to respond to the marvel? The cardinal sin is in our failure not to sense the grandeur of the moment, the marvel and mystery of being, the possibility of quiet exaltation. The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state - it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions. Celebration is an act of expressing respect or reverence for that which one needs or honors... inward appreciation, lending spiritual form to everyday acts.
Attention | Failure | Giving | Lending | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Pleasure | Power | Quiet | Receive | Respect | Reverence | Sense | Sin | Singularity | Time | Respect | Failure |
Envy and fear are the only passions to which no pleasure is attached.
John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”
Spiritual persons suffer great trials from the fear of being lost on the road and that God has abandoned them… Their soul was taking pleasure in being in that quietness and ease, instead of working with its faculties.
Seven Steps to Success 1) Make a commitment to grow daily. 2) Value the process more than events. 3) Don't wait for inspiration. 4) Be willing to sacrifice pleasure for opportunity. 5) Dream big. 6) Plan your priorities. 7) Give up to go up.
Commitment | Plan | Pleasure | Sacrifice | Success | Value |
Whoever feels pain in hearing a good character of his neighbor will feel a pleasure in the reverse; and those who despair to rise in distinction by their virtues are happy if others can be depressed to a level with themselves.
Character | Despair | Distinction | Good | Happy | Pain | Pleasure | Will |
Robinson Jeffers, fully John Robinson Jeffers
What is this thing called life? I believe that the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life, only we do not call it so--I speak of the life... makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow from a chemical reaction? I think they were here already, I think the rocks and the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies have their various consciousness, all things are conscious; but the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass to concentrate the heat and make it catch fire...but those and all things have their own awareness, as the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all, like the cells of a man's body making one being, they make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.
All desirable things... are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.
Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality
Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre
It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.
Pleasure |
Jules de Goncourt, fully Jules Huot de Goncourt
How utterly futile debauchery seems once it has been accomplished, and what ashes of disgust it leaves in the soul! The pity of it is that the soul outlives the body, or in other words that impression judges sensation and that one thinks about and finds fault with the pleasure one has taken.
Fault | Impression | Pity | Pleasure | Soul | Words | Fault |
Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz
Obstinacy is a fault of temperament. Stubbornness and intolerance of contradiction result from a special kind of egotism, which elevates above everything else the pleasure of its autonomous intellect, to which others must bow.
Contradiction | Fault | Intolerance | Pleasure | Fault |
Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
A scientist worthy of the name, above all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.
Impression | Pleasure | Work |
Krishna, also Kreeshna, Krsna, Lord Krishna NULL
Those who have conquered themselves...live in peace, alike in cold and heat, pleasure and pain, praise and blame...To such people a clod of dirt, a stone, and gold are the same...Because they are impartial, they rise to great heights.
The first thing men do when they have renounced pleasure, through decency, lassitude, or for the sake of health, is to condemn it in others. Such conduct denotes a kind of latent affection for the very things they left off; they would like no one to enjoy a pleasure they can no longer indulge in; and thus they show their feelings of jealousy.
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
Health | Individual | Pleasure | Happiness |
It is our will that directs our mind toward this or that, depending on the pleasure we find in either. Therefore conversion is a matter of healing the will, not of mending the intellect.
Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, fully Arthur James Balfour, aka Lord Balfour
The superstition that all our hours of work are a minus quantity in the happiness of life, and all the hours of idleness are plus ones, is a most ludicrous and pernicious doctrine, and its greatest support comes from our not taking sufficient trouble, not making a real effort, to make work as near pleasure as it can be.
Idleness | Pleasure | Superstition | Work | Happiness |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.