This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thomas Erskine, Lord Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine
The body travels more easily than the mind, and until we have limbered up our imagination we continue to think as though we had stayed home. We have not really budged a step until we take up residence in someone else's point of view.
Body | Imagination | Mind | Wisdom | Think |
Ralph Gerard, fully Ralph Waldo Gerard
How to teach rigor while preserving imagination is an unsolved challenge to education.
Challenge | Education | Imagination | Teach | Wisdom |
One should only celebrate a happy ending; celebrations at the outset exhaust the joy and energy needed to urge us forward and sustain us in the long struggle. And of all celebrations a wedding is the worst; no day should be kept more quietly and humbly.
There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.
Imagination | Nothing | Taste | Wisdom |
I once counseled a man in despair to do what I myself did in a similar circumstances: to live for short terms. Come, I said to myself at that time, at any rate you can bear it for a quarter of an hour.
Circumstances | Despair | Man | Time | Wisdom |
Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"
An uncontrolled imagination may become as surely intoxicated by over-indulgence as a toper may do bodily with strong drink.
Imagination | Indulgence | Wisdom |
There is nothing in man that must be held in check as the imagination - the most mobile and most dangerous of all our capacities.
Imagination | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |
God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness; and laughter is on top of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Despair | God | Laughter | Madness | Mirth | Reason | Sorrow | Tears | Wisdom |
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out of itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.
Appearance | Events | Ideas | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Power | Reality | Time | Vision | Wisdom |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.
Defects | Imperfection | Life | Life | Light | Perfection | Progress | Suffering | Wholeness | Wisdom |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense- he is "collective man" - one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.
Aims | Art | Ends | Free will | Man | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Will | Wisdom | Art |
Life itself is experienced as an endless celebration, an eternal dance and rhythm, continuously pulsating sound. To the initiate, life is a vibrating, harmoniously synchronized melody. The shame works with this feeling of sharing the rhythm of the cosmic dance of fields of energy that are the source, the matrix of all matter.
Energy | Eternal | Life | Life | Melody | Shame | Sound | Wisdom |
We are poor, indeed, when we have no half-wishes left us. The heart and the imagination close the shutters the instant they are gone.
Heart | Imagination | Wisdom | Wishes |