This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"
For there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely, by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience; since many have the arguments relating to what can be known, but because they lack experience they neglect the arguments, and neither avoid what is harmful nor follow what is good. For if a man who has never seen fire should prove by adequate reasoning that fire burns and injures things and destroys them, his mind would not be satisfied thereby, nor would he avoid fire, until he placed his hand or some combustible substance in the fire, so that he might prove by experience that which reasoning taught. But when he has had actual experience of combustion his mind is made certain and rests in the full light of truth. Therefore reasoning does not suffice, but experience does.
Doubt | Experience | Intuition | Knowledge | Light | Man | Mind | Neglect | Rest | Wisdom |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Dream manfully and nobly, and thy dreams shall be prophets.
Life is a journey, not a home; a road, not a city of habitation; and the enjoyments and blessings we have are but little inns on the roadside of life, where we may be refreshed for a moment, that we may with new strength press on to the end - to the rest that remaineth for the people of God.
Blessings | God | Journey | Life | Life | Little | People | Rest | Strength | Wisdom |
There is nothing can equal the tender hours when life is first in bloom, when the heart like a bee, in a wild of flowers, finds everywhere perfume; when the present is all and it questions not if those flowers shall pass away, but pleased with its own delightful lot, dreams never of decay.
Edgar Cayce, known as the "Sleeping Prophet"
The alternative to recalling and interpreting dreams is not always pleasant. Individuals cannot expect to drift forever. If they do not puzzle out their identity, and the direction of their lives by the aid of their dreams, then they may be brought, by the relentless action of their own pent-up souls, into some crisis which requires that they come to terms with themselves. It may be a medical crisis. It may be the end of a marriage or of a job. It may be depression or withdrawal.
Action | Aid | Depression | Dreams | Marriage | Wisdom | Crisis |
And all your dreams and other such like folly, to deep oblivion let them be consigned; for they arise but from your melancholy, by which your health is being undermined. A straw for all the meaning you can find in dreams! They aren’t worth a hill of beans, for no one knows what dreaming really means.
Dreams | Folly | Health | Meaning | Means | Melancholy | Oblivion | Wisdom | Worth |
Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivises. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating.
Dreams | Fear | Hate | Liberty | Popularity | Wisdom | Learn |
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting.
Rest is not quitting the busy career; rest is the fitting of self to its sphere.
Lord Dunsany, fully Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany
Man knows his littleness; his own mountains remind him; but the dreams of man make up for our faults and failings; for the brevity of our lives, for the narrowness of our scope; they leap over boundaries and are away and away.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with true greatness, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.
Good | Greatness | Pain | Rest | Wisdom | World | Happiness |
A dream is incorrectly interpreted if the interpretation leaves the dreamer unmoved and disappointed. Dreams come to expand, not to diminish us.