This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Select the lucky and avoid the unlucky. Ill-luck is generally the penalty of folly, and there is no disease so contagious.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
That youthful fervor, which is sometimes called enthusiasm, but which is a heat of imagination subsequently discovered to be inconsistent with the experience of actual life.
Enthusiasm | Experience | Imagination | Life | Life |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
From childhood upwards, everything is done to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile. And if, by misadventure, some spark of imagination remains, its unfortunate possessor is considered unsound and dangerous, worthy only of contempt in time of peace and of prison or a traitor’s death in time of war.
Childhood | Contempt | Death | Imagination | Men | Peace | Prison | Time | Traitor | War |
It doesn't matter what the disease is. There is always room for hope. I'm not going to die because of statistics. I hope you won't either.
Disease | Hope | Statistics |
Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity; to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.
Eternity | Existence | Force | Habit | Imagination | Nothing | Power | Present | Reason | Reflection | Thinking |
Losses are comparative, imagination only makes them of any moment.
What but this faculty of imagination dispenses reputation, awards respect and veneration to persons, works, laws, and the great? How insufficient are all the riches of the earth without her consent!
Earth | Imagination | Reputation | Respect | Riches | Riches | Respect |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those who promote life do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal, something that appears to imagination to live in a heaven remote from strife and failure and the devouring jaws of Time.
Beauty | Eternal | Existence | Failure | God | Heaven | Imagination | Life | Life | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Time | Truth | Failure | God |
No company is preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
Taking medicine is often only making a new disease to cure or hide the old one.
The surest road to health, say what they will, is never to suppose that we shall be ill. Most of those evils we poor mortals know from doctors and imagination flow.
Health | Imagination | Will |
If a person’s face does not show a little sadness his thoughts are not deep.
By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.
Day | Imagination |
Wisdom is the tears of experience, the bridge of experience and imagination over time. It is the listening heart, the melancholy sigh, the distillation of despair to provide a realistic, if often despondent, view of the world.
Despair | Experience | Heart | Imagination | Listening | Melancholy | Tears | Time | Wisdom | World |