This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Robert Fulghum, fully Robert Lee Fulghum
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge; that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts; that hope always triumphs over experience; that laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe love is stronger than death.
Death | Dreams | Experience | Grief | History | Hope | Imagination | Knowledge | Laughter | Love | Myth |
William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.
Beauty | Conscience | God | Heart | Imagination | Love | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Truth | Will | Worship | Beauty |
This is the punishment of a liar: he is not believed, even when he speaks the truth.
Punishment | Truth |
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
For the unified mind in accord with the Way all self-centered striving ceases. Doubts and irresolutions vanish and life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold nothing. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind’s power. Here thought, feeling, knowledge, and imagination are of no value. In this world of Suchness there is neither self nor other-than-self.
Faith | Imagination | Knowledge | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | Power | Self | Thought | World |
Your silence is better than your speech.
Reality has three natures: imagination, interdependence, and the nature of ultimate perfection One considers interdependence. Because of forgetfulness and prejudices, we generally cloak reality with a veil of false views and opinions. This is seeing reality through imagination. Imagination is an illusion of reality which conceives of reality as an assembly of small pieces of separate entities and selves.
Forgetfulness | Illusion | Imagination | Nature | Perfection | Reality |
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.
Concealment | Revelation | Silence | Speech |
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Silence |
A wounded conscience is often inflicted as a punishment for lack of true repentance; great is the difference betwixt a man’s being frightened at and humbled for his sins.
Conscience | Man | Punishment | Repentance |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The punishment of criminals should be of use; when a man is hanged he is good for nothing.
Good | Man | Nothing | Punishment |
My child can be no more guilty or deserving of punishment for my sin than he can see with my eyes and feel with my nerves.
Punishment | Sin | Child | Guilty |
If we can get past various fundamentalist attitudes about the spiritual life, such as attachment to a too simple code of morality, fixed interpretations of stories, and a community in which individual thinking is not prized, then many different ways of being spiritual come into view. We may discover that there are ways to be spiritual that do not counter the soul's need for body, individuality, imagination and exploration. Eventually we might find that all emotions, all human activities, and all spheres of life have deep roots in the mysteries of the soul, and therefore are holy.
Body | Emotions | Imagination | Individual | Individuality | Life | Life | Morality | Need | Past | Soul | Thinking |
We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb is taken off from our passions, and our imagination wanders at will. When awake, we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams, when we are off guard, they return securely and unbidden.
Dreams | Imagination | Will |