This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All life is a dream. But whether it be dream or truths to do well is what matters. If it be truth, for truth's sake. If not, then to gain friends for the time when we awaken.
When I had nothing more to lose, I was given everything. When I ceased to be who I am, I found myself. When I experienced humiliation and yet kept on walking, I understood that I was free to choose my destiny. Perhaps there's something wrong with me, I don't know, perhaps my marriage was a dream I couldn't understand while it lasted. All I know is that even though I can live without her, I would still like to see her again, to say what I never said when we were together: I love you more than I love myself. If I could say that, then I could go on living, at peace with myself, because that love has redeemed me.
The wise men understood that this natural world is only an image and a copy of paradise. The existence of this world is simply a guarantee that there exists a world that is perfect. God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom… The world is being created and destroyed in this very moment. Whoever you met will reappear, whoever you lost will return. Don’t betray the grace that was bestowed on you. Understand what is going on inside you and you will understand what is going on inside everyone else. Don’t imagine that I came to bring peace. I came with a sword… The world lies in the hands of those that have the courage to dream and who take the risk of living out their dreams - each according to his or her own talent… The world only gets better because people risk something to make it better.
Better | Courage | Dreams | Existence | God | Grace | Guarantee | Men | People | Risk | Will | Wise | World | God | Understand |
People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same… Personal growth has its price, and she was paying it without complaint… Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, ‘What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you?
Change | God | Growth | Heart | Looks | Miracles | People | Will | God | Afraid |
I want and need to like myself again; I have to convince myself that I’m capable of taking my own decision… I want to be someone capable of seeing the unseen faces, of seeing those who do not seek fame or glory who silently fulfill the role life has given them. I want to be able to do this because the most important things, those that shape our existence, are precisely the ones that never show their faces… I wanted to... feel hatred and love, despair and tedium -- all those simple, yet foolish things that make up everyday life but that give pleasure to your existence. If one day I could get out of here, I would allow myself to be crazy. Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they are crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to… I want to continue being crazy; living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people want it to be.
Day | Despair | Fame | Glory | Important | Life | Life | Need | People | Pleasure |
The only power you have on this planet is the power of your decisions… The optimist and the pessimist both die in the end, but each lives his life in a completely different way… The pain of yesterday is the strength of today… The past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning… The two toughest tests on the spiritual path are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage to not disappoint us with what we find… The universe always helps us in the fight for our dreams, as crazy as they may be. Because they are our dreams, and we even know how much trouble it costs us to dream them… The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.
Courage | Dreams | Feelings | Future | Life | Life | Pain | Past | Patience | Power | Right | Sense | Soul | Strength | Universe | Trouble |
Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream -- whatever that dream might be.
Heart |
It is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill. We might be otherwise, we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek, But in our mind? and if we were not weak, Should we be less in deed than in desire?
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope?
Art | Birth | Death | Despondency | Earth | Fear | Love | Man | Thought | Art | Thought |
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost forever; Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings Give various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last. We rest. -- A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise. -- One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away: It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
Vision is an idle dream at best and a cynical delusion at worst - but not an achievable end.
Delusion |
There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood, and later repeating it to oneself. It disappears as a dream disappears. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.
Nothing |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
All the science of government, imagined by those who govern, is imbibed with these utopias. But we know men too well to dream such dreams. We have not two measures for the virtues of the governed and those of the governors; we know that we ourselves are not without faults and that the best of us would soon be corrupted by the exercise of power. We take men for what they are worth — and that is why we hate the government of man by man, and that we work with all our might — perhaps not strong enough — to put an end to it.
Enough | Government | Hate | Man | Men | Science | Work | Worth | Government |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
Oh, the beautiful utopia, the lovely Christmas dream we can make as soon as we admit that those who govern represent a superior caste, and have hardly any or no knowledge of simple mortals' weaknesses! It would then suffice to make them control one another in hierarchical fashion, to let them exchange fifty papers, at most, among different administrators, when the wind blows down a tree on the national road. Or, if need be, they would have only to be valued at their proper worth, during elections, by those same masses of mortals which are supposed to be endowed with all stupidity in their mutual relations but become wisdom itself when they have to elect their masters.
Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams… Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think scientifically that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution.
Allegories | Death | Expectation | Fate | Feelings | Hope | Ideas | Impression | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Nothing | Prison | Thought | World | Fate | Afraid | Expectation | Old | Think | Thought |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
We know men too well to dream such dreams. We have not two measures for the virtues of the governed and those of the governors; we know that we ourselves are not without faults and that the best of us would soon be corrupted by the exercise of power.
Men |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
There is a big difference between having a mission statement and being truly mission-based. To be truly mission-based means that key decisions can be referred back to the mission -- our reason for being. It means that people can and should object to management edicts that they do not see as connected to the mission...In most organizations, no one would dream of challenging a management decision on the grounds that it does not serve the mission. In other words, most organizations serve those in power rather than a mission. [The mission] says rather, that the source of legitimate power in the organization is its guiding ideas...The cornerstone of a truly democratic system of governance is not voting or any other particular mechanism. It is the belief that power ultimately flows from ideas, not people. To be truly mission-based is to be democratic in this way, to make the mission more important than the boss, something that not too many corporations have yet demonstrated an ability to do.
Ability | Belief | Decision | Important | Means | Mission | Object | Organization | People | Power | Reason | System |
Peter McWilliams, fully Peter Alexander McWilliams
To visualize is to see what is not there, what is not real -- a dream . To visualize is, in fact, to make visual lies . Visual lies, however, have a way of coming true.
Pietro Pomponazzi, aka Petrus Pomponatius
One person has the sense of the possible is to be deceived, as the eye of staff in the vision of something existing in the water, because he judges it to be broken and in the truth of the matter is not broken, but that the object of all or several senses dectpiantur about the same thing does not happen, because (the one) verifies that the other as part of his staff that he did not touch us verifies that is a fraction, in a dream when he is condemned to be broken was broken, and appears to us to Remus .... we do not say that it is broken, and so it is true that nothing truly felt if I did not present an existing thing.