This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Prejudices subsist in people's imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience.
Experience | Imagination | People |
Imagination I understand to be the representation of an individual thought. Imagination is of three kinds: joined with belief of that which is to come; joined with memory of that which is past; and of things present.
Belief | Imagination | Individual | Memory | Past | Present | Thought | Understand |
The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wronged, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them or else leave the door open to self-contempt.
Conscience | Contempt | Hate | Pity | Punishment | Self | Silence | Guilty |
The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions.
Art | Consciousness | Crime | Emotions | Eternal | Experience | Heart | Imagination | Inspiration | Man | Men | Mind | Misfortune | Nature | Opinion | Perception | Pleasure | Power | Present | Sense | Soul | Thought | Wickedness | Misfortune | Art | Thought |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
Imagination | Universe | Wisdom |
Where bright imagination reigns, the fine-wrought spirit feels acuter pains.
Imagination | Spirit |
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
Beauty | Better | Contemplation | Faith | Hope | Imagination | Love | Nature | Science | Taste | Beauty | Contemplation | Understand |
Two protecting deities, indeed, like two sober friends supporting a drunkard, flank human folly and keep it within bounds. One of these deities is Punishment and the other Agreement.
Folly | Punishment | Friends |
How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us some a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away; of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending, the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time.
Absolute | Beginning | Earth | Nature | Silence | Sound | Time |
The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
Imagination | Soul |
The imagination is the secret and harrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
Civilization | Faith | Imagination |
The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
Civilization | Faith | Imagination |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!
Faith | Imagination |
The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Evil | Good | Object | Punishment |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Speech is fractional, silence is integral.
The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the laws of man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the laws of nature, were man as unerring in his judgments as nature.
Cause | Earth | Forbearance | Inevitable | Man | Mercy | Nature | Punishment | Race |