This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ralph Gerard, fully Ralph Waldo Gerard
How to teach rigor while preserving imagination is an unsolved challenge to education.
Challenge | Education | Imagination | Teach | Wisdom |
Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
I have ever gained the most profit, and the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise in my affections.
Books | Memory | Pleasure | Understanding | Wisdom | Think |
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 |
The only connexion or relation of objects, which can lead us beyond the immediate impression of our memory and senses, is that of cause and effect; and that because ‘tis the only one, on which we can found a just inference from one object to another.
Cause | Impression | Memory | Object | Wisdom |
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Literature | Man | Memory | 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 |
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 |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Many things seem greater by imagination than be effect.
Imagination | Wisdom |
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
Conspicuous waste beyond the imagination of Thorstein Veblen has become the mark of American life. As a nation we find ourselves overbuilt, if not overhoused; overfed, although millions of poor people are undernourished; overtransported in overpowered cars; and also... overdefended or overdefensed.
The Imagination makes us transcendent of Time and we see what is gorgeous.
Imagination | Time | Wisdom |