This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Remember that when you are unhappy it is generally because you do not visualize strongly enough the great things that you definitely want to accomplish in life, nor do you employ steadfastly enough your will power, your creative ability, and your patience until your dreams are materialized.
Ability | Dreams | Enough | Life | Life | Patience | Power | Will |
We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.
Good thoughts are no better than good dreams if you don’t follow through.
Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, driveling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth.
Dreams | Freedom | Knowledge | Man | Play | Self | Self-knowledge | Truth | Will |
The soul contains in itself the event that shall presently befall it, for the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts. It is no wonder that particular dreams and presentiments should fall out and be prophetic.
Robert Fulghum, fully Robert Lee Fulghum
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge; that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts; that hope always triumphs over experience; that laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe love is stronger than death.
Death | Dreams | Experience | Grief | History | Hope | Imagination | Knowledge | Laughter | Love | Myth |
Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
If you will it, it is no legend. But if you do not will it, then it remains a legend which I have recited. Dreams and action are not as widely separated as many believe. All acts of men were dreams at first and become dreams again.
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
Rest and unrest derive from illusion; with enlightenment there is no liking and disliking. All dualities come from ignorant inference. They are like dreams of flowers in air: foolish to try to grasp them. Gain and loss, right and wrong: such thoughts must finally be abolished at once.
T. E. Lawrence, fully Thomas Edward Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia
All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds awake to find that it was vanity; But dreamers of day are dangerous men, that they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible.
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
If the eye never sleeps, all dreams will naturally cease. If the mind makes no discriminations, then ten thousand things are as they are, of single essence. to understand the mystery of this One-essence is to be released from all entanglements. When all things are seen equally the timeless Self-essence is reached. No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams come true.
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; no more; and, by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life; for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?
Calamity | Death | Delay | Dread | Dreams | Fortune | Law | Life | Life | Love | Man | Merit | Mind | Mortal | Office | Question | Respect | Time | Troubles | Will | Wrong | Respect | Calamity |
Art teaches us to respect imagination as something far beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul... Leonardo da Vinci asks an interesting question in one of his notebooks: "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" One answer is that the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could, with some effort of imagination, glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events. Dream teaches us to look with that other eye, the eye that in waking life belongs to the artist, to each of us as artist... Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity.
Art | Control | Dreams | Effort | Eternal | Eternity | Events | Heart | Illusion | Imagination | Important | Intention | Life | Life | Question | Rationality | Respect | Sensibility | Soul | Surrender | Time | Respect | Art |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
All our dreams can come true - if we have the courage to pursue them.