This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Jerome Bruner, fully Jerome Seymour Bruner
To create consists precisely in not making unclear combinations and in making those which are useful and which are only a small minority. Invention is discernment, choice. If not a brute algorithm, then it must be a heuristic that guides us to a fruitful combination. What is the heuristic?
Choice | Discernment | Invention |
All good poetry is spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate sense which we term civilization. In each there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern.
Civilization | Philosophy | Poetry | Sense | Words |
The poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen… Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
It is said to have been reported to one of the Roman emperors, as a piece of good news, that one of his subjects had invented a process for manufacturing unbreakable glass. The emperor gave orders that the inventor should be put to death and the records of his invention should be destroyed. If the invention had been put on the market, the manufacturers of regular glass would have been put out of business; there would have been unemployment that would have caused political unrest, and perhaps revolution.
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
Imagination | Invention |
Invention in language should no more be discouraged than should invention in mechanics. Grammar is the grave of letters.
No invention could ever take the hard work out of creating - out of good writing, painting, composing, inventing, etc. The economy of the spirit is incurably an economy of scarcity. An affluent society might be able to dispense with the ethic of work in its everyday life, but to attain any sort of excellence it will have to implant implacable taskmasters in the breasts of its people. Indeed, without the disciple of the creative effort the affluent society will be without stability. It might have to become a creative society in order to survive.
Effort | Excellence | Good | Invention | Life | Life | Order | People | Society | Spirit | Will | Work | Writing | Excellence | Society |
The justest division of human learning is that derived from the three different faculties of the soul, the seat of learning; history being relative to the memory, poetry to the imagination, and philosophy to the reason.
History | Imagination | Learning | Memory | Philosophy | Poetry | Reason | Soul |
Intuition represents the free life of the mind, the poetry native to it, which I am far from despising; but this is the subjective or ideal element in thought which we must discount if we are anxious to possess true knowledge.
Intuition | Knowledge | Life | Life | Mind | Poetry | Thought | Thought |
Both poetry and philosophy are prodigal of eulogy over the mind which ransoms itself by its own energy from a captivity to custom, which breaks the common bounds of empire, and cuts a Simplon over mountains of difficulty for its own purpose, whether of good or of evil.
Custom | Difficulty | Energy | Evil | Good | Mind | Philosophy | Poetry | Purpose | Purpose |