This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Most adults would not dream of belittling, humiliating, or bullying (verbally or physically) another adult. But many of the same adults think nothing of treating their adolescent child like a nonperson. . . . Adolescents deserve the same civility their parents routinely extend to total strangers.
Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith
To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.
Faith | Future | Hypothesis | Journey | Knowing | Knowledge | Power | Work | Old |
Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.
Dreams | Imagination | Reality |
Both dance and dream are brought into being by the consciousness of a moment. They can never be repeated or successfully imitated. But you can dance and dream again. You must, if life is to continue.
Consciousness | Life | Life |
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.
Malcolm S. Forbes, fully Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Sr.
When you cease to dream you cease to live.
Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
In a dream thou mayst live a lifetime, and all be forgotten in the morning: Even such is life, and so soon perisheth its memory.
If you reject the theory of evolution, or think that there is such a thing as alternative (as opposed to evidence-based) medicine, or claim without evidence that aliens are visiting the planet, or think that the stars influence human destiny, and so on, you are anti-science and live in a dream world with no connection to reality. More damning, you are engaging in the ultimate act of arrogance: to declare something true or untrue not because you have reason or evidence, but only because it makes you feel better. May I suggest that you need a good dose of humility, and that one way to get it is to admit that the universe is not about you, and that some people out there really know more than you do, as unpleasant a thought as this may be?
Evidence | Good | Influence | Need | People | Reason | Thought | Universe | World | Think | Thought |
You block your dream when you allow your fear to grow bigger than your faith.
Fear |
Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
Make every day count. Make every hour count. Make every minute count. And don't stop until you have exercised your full potential, realizing your impossible dream and fulfilling your total destiny to become the person that you, and only you, are capable of being.
All pleasure is social…It springs from alienation. Even when enjoyment is ignorant of the prohibition it infringes, it owes its origin to civilization, to the fixed order from which it yearns to return to the very nature from which that order protects it. Only when dream absolves them of the compulsion of work, of the individual’s attachment to a particular social function and finally to a self, leading back to a primal state free of domination and discipline, do human beings feel the magic of pleasure…Thought arose in the course of liberation from terrible nature, which is finally subjugated utterly. Pleasure, so to speak, is nature’s revenge. In it human beings divest themselves of thought, escape from civilization. In earlier societies such home-coming was provided by communal festivals. Primitive orgies are the collective origin of pleasure.
Meryl Streep, born Mary Louise Streep
I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams, where you dream yourself.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
The increase in both types of wisdom—wisdom of the mind and wisdom of the soul—has surely come to pass; where we have fallen short is in integrating these spheres of knowledge. Only by balancing the scientific with the spiritual can we transform the dream of an ideal future into a functional blueprint for society, for true communication can begin only when human minds and souls interact. With communication comes understanding; with understanding comes compassion; and with compassion comes a natural movement toward universalism.
Compassion | Future | Mind | Understanding | Wisdom |