This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks.
As our appreciation of happiness in relationship increases, we take notice of the things that tend to take us away from this feeling. One major catalyst taking us away is the need to be right. An opinion that is taken too seriously sets up conditions that must be met first before you can be happy. In relationships, this might sound like 'You must agree with or see my point of view in order for me to love and respect you.' In a more positive feeling state, this attitude would seem silly or harmful. We can disagree, even on important issues, and still love one another - when our own thought systems no longer have control over our lives and we see the innocence in our divergent points of view.
Appreciation | Control | Important | Innocence | Love | Need | Opinion | Order | Relationship | Respect | Sound | Thought | Appreciation | Respect | Happiness | Thought |
But it is my happiness to be half Welsh, and that the better half.
To a happy person, the formula for happiness is quite simple. Regardless of what happened early this morning, last week, or last year
Policy makers take note: Governments that choose to measure happiness and that aim to increase it in ways that don
The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness. [quoting F. W. Sanderson]
Richard L. Evans, fully Richard Louis Evans
May we never let the things we can't have, or don't have, or shouldn't have, spoil our enjoyment of the things we do have and can have. As we value our happiness let us not forget it, for one of the greatest lessons in life is learning to be happy without the things we cannot or should not have.
Enjoyment | Happy | Learning | Life | Life | Happiness | Value |
Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.
Richard E. Byrd, fully Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr.
The human race cannot go forward without liberty. If this be correct, then all people everywhere should strive for liberty. If they achieve liberty, they will get a chance to pursue happiness and perhaps will be able to develop toward the ultimate goal of creation.
Only in the theatre was it possible to see the performers and to be warmed by their personal charm, to respond to their efforts and to feel their response to the applause and appreciative laughter of the audience. It had an intimate quality; audience and actors conspired to make a little oasis of happiness and mirth within the walls of the theatre. Try as we will, we cannot be intimate with a shadow on a screen, nor a voice from a box.
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment.
Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah
We could talk further about the importance of finding an occupation that both gives you a sense of self-respect and provides the resources to live an autonomous life. We talk in Habits of the Heart, about these issues-how for many Americans, at various levels in the occupational hierarchy, the job somehow doesn't prove adequate in fulfilling one's autonomous self and often becomes a means-an instrument-to the acquisition of those resources which will allow one to live in a private lifestyle that will somehow fulfill this expectation that we will find this unique person-who we really are-and attain self-realization, self-fulfillment, happiness. The terms are several but they all point in the same direction. But when we press the question, "What are the criteria that tell us what happiness is or that define the wants that when they are satisfied will lead to self-realization?", then the confident tones that we have been hearing begin to falter. And instead of any clear notion of any content there is simply the reassertion of "Whatever for you that fulfillment or happiness may be." It is not surprising that Americans turn to psychology as the place that is focused on that inner self.
Expectation | Fulfillment | Occupation | Psychology | Self | Sense | Unique | Wants | Will | Expectation | Happiness |
Deliberately to pursue happiness is not the surest way of achieving it. Seek it for its own sake and I doubt whether you will find it.
Robert V. Taylor, aka The Very Reverend Robert V. Taylor
Secure in whom we are, rooted in one particular tradition or none at all, we have no reason to fear discovering God in the truth and wisdom of many traditions. Love casts out fear inviting us into happiness for all people and Creation.
Fear | God | Love | People | Reason | Tradition | Truth | Wisdom | God | Happiness |