This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied with our present condition, or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes.
Destroy | Enjoyment | Excellence | Imagination | Improvement | Man | Mind | Past | Present | Will | Wisdom |
Olaf Stapledon, fully William Olaf Stapledon
I should like to persuade religious people that some of us who reject their faith, nevertheless do have an experience which is at least very much like their essential religious experience. We feel, sometimes with remarkable intensity and clarity, our ‘at-oneness’ with something which might be the fundamental reality behind appearances.
Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith
To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives; it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surprise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more securely.
Future | Hypothesis | Ignorance | Imagination | Man | Mind | Risk | Wisdom |
Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment.
Better | Enthusiasm | Imagination | Judgment | Mind | Temper | Wisdom |
Only awareness can free us from our thoughts. In the moment we become aware that our thoughts are just thoughts, rather than reality itself, we wake up from their spell and can return to presence. It is empowering to dispel and can return to presence. It is empowering to discover that we are not enslaved by our thoughts, by how our mind interprets reality.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
In times when the passions are beginning to take charge of the conduct of human affairs, one should pay less attention to what men of experience and common sense are thinking than to what is preoccupying the imagination of dreamers.
Attention | Beginning | Common Sense | Conduct | Experience | Imagination | Men | Sense | Thinking | Wisdom |
Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Usually people interested in spiritual development think in terms of the importance of mind, that mysterious, high and deep thing that we have decided to learn about. But strangely enough, the profound and the transcendental are to be found in the factory. It may not fill you with bliss to look at it, it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we have read about, but somehow reality is to be found there in the way in which we relate with everyday problems. If we relate to them in a simple, earthy way, we will work in a more balanced manner, and things will be dealt with properly.
Enough | Good | Mind | People | Problems | Reality | Sound | Will | Wisdom | Work | Learn | Think |
All societies create their own worlds, using language and folklore to impose an arbitrary order on the complexity of the cosmos. This ordering of reality helps make sense of things by interpreting information in ways which are compatible with what is already known.
If reality flows like a stream, then knowledge of such reality also becomes fluid, a process rather than a set of fixed truths. And because all knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated and applied in thought; then thought too must be seen as part of the same eternal tide... Thought is, in essence, a response of memory. It consists of a repetition of some image or sensation, or it involves a combination or reorganisation of such repetition in a new and useful way. So, in the end, intelligence turns out to be part of the flow. It is not grounded in cells or molecules, but drawn from the same moving stream as reality. In other words, mind and matter are ultimately inseparable.
Eternal | Intelligence | Knowledge | Memory | Mind | Reality | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Thought |
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, "I am suffering," than to say, "This landscape is ugly."
Better | Imagination | Suffering | Ugly | Wisdom |
Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
Steve Biko, fully Stephen "Steve" Bantu Biko
The myth of integration as propounded under the banner of the liberal ideology must be cracked because it makes people believe that something is being achieved when in reality the artificially integrated circles are a sophomoric to the blacks while salving the consciences of the few guilt-stricken whites.
Guilt | Integration | Myth | People | Reality |
The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to see; and sight must be reinforced by insight before souls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as well as objects, realities and relations as well as appearances and accidental connections.
Heart | Ideas | Imagination | Insight | Manners | Mind | Wisdom |
John Blofeld, fully John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld
The world is full of paradox. For example, [in Buddhism] though no notion of a creator is entertained, great stress is laid upon the need for faith and piety. By faith is meant not trust in a benevolent diety avid for love, praise and obedience, but conviction that beyond the seeming reality misreported by our senses which is inherently unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively perceived, will give our lives undreamed-of meaning and endow the most insignificant object with holiness and beauty.
Beauty | Example | Faith | Love | Meaning | Mystery | Need | Obedience | Object | Paradox | Piety | Praise | Reality | Trust | Will | World |
Purpose is about developing relationships. Purpose is about bringing attention and intention into the present moment, moving ahead with new ideas, giving and receiving support, volunteering, mentoring, listening to the imagination and intuition, communicating, taking action based on inner direction and hints from the external, being adaptable, taking responsibility and ending the victim stance forever surrendering to the divine will and working with the lessons developing fluidity, tolerance, compassion, and the ability to love.
Ability | Action | Attention | Compassion | Giving | Ideas | Imagination | Intention | Intuition | Listening | Love | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility | Will | Victim |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Here is the test of wisdom, wisdom is not finally tested in schools, wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things.
Excellence | Immortality | Qualities | Reality | Soul | Wisdom | Excellence |