This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Life seems to me like a Japanese picture which our imagination does not allow to end with the margin. We aim at the infinite and when our arrow falls to earth it is in flames.
Earth | Imagination | Life | Life |
It is a smaller thing to suffer punishment than to have deserved it.
The punishment suffered by the wise who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of bad people.
Government | People | Punishment | Wise | Government |
By the time you rise through the ranks, the culture of homogenization has bred the spirit and imagination out of you.
Culture | Imagination | Spirit | Time |
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech.
Philosophy finds talkativeness a disease very difficult and hard to cure. For its remedy, conversation, requires hearers: but talkative people hear nobody, for they are ever prating. And the first evil this inability to keep silence produces is an inability to listen.
Conversation | Disease | Evil | People | Philosophy | Silence |
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
What a strange power there is in silence! How many resolutions are formed, how many sublime conquests effected, during that pause when lips are closed, and the soul secretly feels the eye of her Maker upon her! They are the strong ones of earth who know how to keep silence when it is a pain and grief unto them, and who gives time to their own souls to wax strong against temptation.
Earth | Grief | Pain | Power | Silence | Soul | Temptation | Time |
The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
Imagination | Time |
We should never allow ourselves to be persuaded excepting by the evidence of our Reason, of our Reason and not our imagination nor of our senses.
Evidence | Imagination | Reason |
Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.
Punishment | Reward | Suffering |