This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Romances, in general, are calculated rather to fire the imagination than to inform the judgment.
Imagination | Judgment | Wisdom |
Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley
"Keep aloof from sadness," says an Icelandic writer, "for sadness is a sickness of the soul." Life has, indeed, many ills, but the mind that views every object in its most cheering aspect, and every doubtful dispensation as replete with latent good, bears within itself a powerful and perpetual antidote. The gloomy soul aggravates misfortune, while a cheerful smile often dispels those mists that portend a storm.
Good | Life | Life | Mind | Misfortune | Object | Sadness | Smile | Soul | Wisdom |
Norm Shealy, fully Dr. C. Norman Shealy
The greatest deficit in academic medicine is that it has generally failed to approach the problem of preventing disease or health promotion.... we are too busy taking care of people with disease to be bothered with preventing it.
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. Not being able to enlarge the one, let us contract the other; for it is from their difference that all evils arise which render us unhappy.
Imagination | Reality | Wisdom | World |
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 |
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 |
Doubt is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization - the dim night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith that springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best.
Age | Civilization | Darkness | Day | Disease | Doubt | Faith | Intelligence | Light | Price | 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 |
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 |
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.
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 |
Greta Woodrew, Pseud. for Greta Andron Smolowe
The body is a servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind. There is a mind/body connection that is powerful. As a healer, I am convinced disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought. Sick thoughts express themselves through a sickly body. Thoughts of fear can kill a man. People who live in fear of disease are most likely the very people who get the disease. Conversely, if you would improve your body, guard your mind.
Body | Circumstances | Disease | Fear | Health | Kill | Man | Mind | People | Thought | Wisdom |
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 |
Use your imagination not to scare yourself to death but to inspire yourself to life.
Death | Imagination | Life | Life |
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Enough | Imagination | Important | Knowledge | World |