This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.
Imagination | Nothing | Taste | Wisdom |
Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"
An uncontrolled imagination may become as surely intoxicated by over-indulgence as a toper may do bodily with strong drink.
Imagination | Indulgence | Wisdom |
There is nothing in man that must be held in check as the imagination - the most mobile and most dangerous of all our capacities.
Imagination | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out of itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.
Appearance | Events | Ideas | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Power | Reality | Time | Vision | Wisdom |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
The silence in our lives is under assault on all fronts: roaring jets and blasting Walkmans, numbing elevator music and blaring headline news. It’s hard to genuflect to the beat of MTV. We are wired, plugged in, constantly catered to and cajoled. After a while we become terrified out of the silence, unaware of what it has to offer. We drown out the simple question of God with the simplistic sound-bites of man.
God | Man | Music | News | Question | Silence | Sound | Wisdom | God |
War is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.
Punishment | War | Wisdom |
I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in the punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
Good | Government | Health | Little | Observation | People | Punishment | Rebellion | Rights | Sound | Truth | Wisdom | World |
Meditation is like a river. It cannot be tamed. It flows and flows and overflows its banks. It is music without sound. It is the silence in which the observer ceases to be immediately he plunges in.
Meditation | Music | Silence | Sound | Wisdom |
We are poor, indeed, when we have no half-wishes left us. The heart and the imagination close the shutters the instant they are gone.
Heart | Imagination | Wisdom | Wishes |
Modern man seems to be afraid of silence. We are conditioned by radio and television on which every minute must be filled with talking, or some kind of sound. We are stimulated by the American philosophy of keeping on the move all the time - busy, busy, busy. This tends to make us shallow. A person's life can be deepened tremendously by periods of silence, used in the constructive ways of meditation and prayer. Great personalities have spent much time in the silence of life.
Life | Life | Man | Meditation | Philosophy | Prayer | Silence | Sound | Talking | Television | Time | Wisdom | Afraid |
Compton Mackenzie, fully Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie
Take two workers in an organization. One limits his giving by wages he is paid. He insists on being paid instantly for what he does. That shows he is a man of limited imagination and intelligence. The other is a natural giver. His philosophy of life compels him to make himself useful. He knows that if he takes care of other people's problems they will be forced to take care of him to protect their own interests. The more a man gives of himself to his work, the more he will get out of it, both in wages and satisfaction.
Care | Giving | Imagination | Intelligence | Life | Life | Man | Organization | People | Philosophy | Problems | Will | Wisdom | Work |
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Mind | Punishment | Will | Wisdom |
As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by its shining, so must we, if we would know the joy of God, hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds, still before Him, whose voice commands, whose love warns, whose truth makes fair our whole being. God speaks for the most pat in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling voices, His voice is little likely to be heard.
God | Joy | Little | Love | Silence | Soul | Truth | Wills | Wisdom | God |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Many things seem greater by imagination than be effect.
Imagination | Wisdom |