This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.
Beauty | Imagination | Spirit | Truth | Beauty |
Jean Grou, fully Jean Nicholas Grou
We must not measure the reality of love by feelings, but by results. Feelings are very delusive. They often depend on mere natural temperament, and the devil wrests them to our hurt. A glowing imagination is apt to seek itself rather than God. But if you are earnest in striving to serve and endure for God's sake, if you persevere amid temptation, dryness, weariness, and desolation, you may rest assured that your love is real.
You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.
Energy | Imagination | Will |
Jessamyn West, fully Mary Jessamyn West
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
Imagination | Past | Work |
Habit accustoms us to everything. What we see too much, we no longer imagine; and it is only imagination which makes us feel the ills of others. It is thus by dint of seeing death and suffering that priests and doctors become pitiless.
Death | Imagination | Suffering |
Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstaticâ but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.
Capacity | Despair | Energy | Imagination | Resilience |
The great gift of the human imagination is that it has no limits or ending.
Few people have the imagination for reality.
Imagination | People |
The difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied.
Absence | Imagination | Play |
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than are the classics.
The essence of a thing is neither tantamount to nor commensurable with the impression it produces; what is reflected in the imagination of an individual is something altogether different from the original. The stratum of inner experience and the realm of objective reality do not lie on the same level.
Experience | Imagination | Impression | Individual | Reality |
There is no vacuum of religion. Religion is neither the outgrowth of imagination nor the product of will. It is not an inner process, a feeling, or a thought, and should not be looked upon as a bundle of episodes in the life of man… The pious man believe that there is a secret interrelationship among all events, that the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension, that there is a history of God and man in which everything is involved…Religion to him is the integration of the detail into the whole, the infusion of the momentary into the lasting. As time and space in any perception, so is the totality of life implied in every act of piety. There is an objective coherency that holds all episodes together… Man does not produce what is overwhelming and holy. The wonder occurs to him when he is ready to accept it.
God | History | Imagination | Integration | Life | Life | Man | Pious | Religion | Space | Time | Wonder | God |
Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too.
Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
Art | Imagination | Truth | Art |
Karl Jaspers, fully Karl Theodor Jaspers
But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil--that is moral guilt.
Guilt | Imagination | Individual | Law | Misfortune | Moral law | Neglect | Submission | Misfortune | Guilty |
Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn
Six Declines of Modern Youth: Decline of Fitness due to modern methods of locomotion [moving about];Decline of Initiative and Enterprise due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis; Decline of Memory and Imagination due to the confused restlessness of modern life; Decline of Skill and Care due to the weakened tradition of craftsmanship; Decline of Self-discipline due to the ever-present availability of stimulants and tranquilizers; And worst of all: Decline of Compassion due to the unseemly haste with which modern life is conducted or as William Temple called "spiritual death".
Care | Compassion | Disease | Haste | Imagination | Initiative | Life | Life | Memory | Restlessness | Skill | Tradition |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
Dreams | Imagination |