This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Curiosity is the direct incontinency of the spirit. Know therefore at the door before you enter upon your neighbor’s privacy; and remember that there is no difference between entering into his house and looking into it.
The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied with our present condition, or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes.
Destroy | Enjoyment | Excellence | Imagination | Improvement | Man | Mind | Past | Present | Will | Wisdom |
Tom Stoppard, fully Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler
Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.
Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith
To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives; it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surprise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more securely.
Future | Hypothesis | Ignorance | Imagination | Man | Mind | Risk | Wisdom |
Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment.
Better | Enthusiasm | Imagination | Judgment | Mind | Temper | Wisdom |
It is remarkable that great affectation and great absence of it (unconsciousness) are at first sight very similar; they are both apt to produce singularity.
Absence | Affectation | Singularity | Unconsciousness | Wisdom |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
In times when the passions are beginning to take charge of the conduct of human affairs, one should pay less attention to what men of experience and common sense are thinking than to what is preoccupying the imagination of dreamers.
Attention | Beginning | Common Sense | Conduct | Experience | Imagination | Men | Sense | Thinking | Wisdom |
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, "I am suffering," than to say, "This landscape is ugly."
Better | Imagination | Suffering | Ugly | Wisdom |
There is a vast difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration is a concession; liberty is a right; toleration is a matter of expediency; liberty is a matter of principle; toleration is a grant of man; liberty is a gift of God.
Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
Perception is based, to a very large extent, on conceptual models - which are always inadequate, often incomplete and sometimes profoundly wrong. This complex situation arose because signals from the environment itself can be inadequate. The sort of information we need is not always available. And so, knowledge from the past, mixed up with assumptions about that knowledge which may be more or less appropriate, are used to augment information provided by the senses. Which means that our perception of any situation depends only partly on sensory signals being received at that time. And it is only a very short step from there, to perception which occurs in the absence of all immediate signals and has to be labeled “extrasensory”.
Absence | Knowledge | Means | Need | Past | Perception | Time | Wisdom | Wrong |
Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and cheerfulness. Thus happy have we seen the country.
Cheerfulness | Happy | Health | Labor | Prosperity | Wisdom |
We are exactly like a galaxy in or fine anatomy. Matter moves through you and me as easily as the wind blows through the branches of a tree. And the boundaries we draw at the limits of our skin are as arbitrary as those which separate our solar system from the next one. Everything is indeed connected to everything else, in the best traditions of ecology, but it goes further than that. Everything is everything else. There is no difference - and nothing is impossible.
The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to see; and sight must be reinforced by insight before souls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as well as objects, realities and relations as well as appearances and accidental connections.
Heart | Ideas | Imagination | Insight | Manners | Mind | Wisdom |
Joe D. Batten and Leonard C. Hudson
The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person is the difference between get and give. The unhappy person is concerned with: the world is against me, what’s in it for me, what are people doing to me, and so forth. When your central theme in life is getting you usually do get headaches. But the happy person is looking toward what he can do, what he can give, what he can accomplish.
William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
The most important thing in life is not simply to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The most important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence and it marks the difference between a man of sense and a fool.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I have said that the soul is not more than the body, and I have said that the body is not more than the soul, and nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is, and whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, and I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, and to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, and there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, and there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe, and I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, for I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, in the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and everyone is sign'd by God's name, and I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.
Better | Body | God | Learning | Man | Men | Nothing | Object | Peace | Self | Soul | Sympathy | Will | Wisdom | Following | God | Understand |