This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, not a quality; its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as the servant of the will. Imagination, as too often understood, is mere fantasy - the image-making power, common to all who have the gift of dreams.
Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
No scientific concept can ever represent the richness of nature or the complexity of its full creative potential. Thus, [information] is only another facet of the diamond... The most that a new model, metaphor or concept in science can give us is the gift of new questions.
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
A friend is a gift you give to yourself.
A good wife is heaven’s last, best gift to man - his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels; her voice is sweet music, her smiles his brightest day, her kiss the guardian of his innocence, her arms the pale of his safety, her industry his surest wealth, her economy his safest steward, her lips his faithful counselors, her bosom the softest pillow of his care.
Care | Day | Good | Heaven | Industry | Innocence | Man | Music | Wealth | Wife | Wisdom |
To value riches is not to be covetous. They are the gift of God, and, like every gift of his, good in themselves, and capable of good use. But to overvalue riches, to give them a place in the heart, which God did not design them to fill, this is covetousness.
Design | God | Good | Heart | Riches | Wisdom | Riches | God | Value |
There is a vast difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration is a concession; liberty is a right; toleration is a matter of expediency; liberty is a matter of principle; toleration is a grant of man; liberty is a gift of God.
Money is a dream. It is a piece of paper on which is imprinted in invisible ink the dream of all the things it will buy, all the trinkets and all the power over others. A kind of institutionalized dream, along with its companion dream-in-stitution of Success, constitutes the main fantasy on which our way of life has been built.
Abdul Baha, or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, born `Abbás Effendí
God has given man the eye of investigation by which he may see and recognize truth. He has endowed man with ears that he may hear the message of reality, and conferred upon him the gift of reason by which he may discover things for himself. Man is not intended to see through the eyes of another, hear through another’s ears nor comprehend with another’s brain. Each human creature has individual endowment, power and responsibility in the creative plan of God.
God | Individual | Man | Plan | Power | Reality | Reason | Responsibility | Truth |
Bishops' Pastoral Letter "Economic Justice For All" NULL
From the patristic period to the present, the Church has affirmed that misuse of the world’s resources or appropriation of them by a minority of the world’s population betrays the gift of creation since “whatever belongs to God belongs to all.”
René Bazin, fully René François Nicolas Marie Bazin
There is no need to go searching for a remedy for the evils of the time. The remedy already exists - it is the gift of one’s self to those who have fallen so low that even hope fails them. Open wide your heart.
The greatest gift that you can give yourself is a little bit of your own attention.
Martin D’Arcy, fully Fr. Martin Cyril D'Arcy
We cannot leave behind what has once been true, for progress is an advance into truth, a deeper appreciation and love of what is familiar, be it a birthright, or a gift such as Revelation.
Appreciation | Love | Progress | Revelation | Truth | Appreciation |