This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
In the world of mind, as in that of matter, we always occupy a position. He who is continually changing his point of view will see more, and that too more clearly, than one who, statue-like, forever stands upon the same pedestal; however lofty and well-placed that pedestal may be.
Circumstances | Effort | Friend | Good | Imagination | Little | Pity | Retirement | Traitor | Will |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I love and am loved by a better man than he.
Enthusiasm | Little | Love | Will |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.
Imagination | Mother |
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert... Le Rouge et le noir.
Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-- a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth.
Error | Grief | Imagination | Man | Science | Truth | Work | Truths |
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
Enthusiasm | Man | Religion | Virtue | Virtue |
I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.
Ideas | Imagination | Laughter | Men | Respect | Worth | Respect | Understand |
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Fear | Grace | Imagination | Lord | Skill |
For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.
Absurd | Imagination |
One never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments.... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.
Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
But I am convinced that those Jews who stand aside today with a malicious smile and with their hands in their trousers' pockets will also want to dwell in our beautiful home.
Belief | Better | Devotion | Enthusiasm | Good | Labor | Money | Will | Work |
Truth stood on one side and Ease on the other; it has often been so.
Imagination | Thought | Thought |
The deepest cause ...of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the humans.
Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars.
Accuracy | History | Imagination |
Thomas Dewar, Lord Dewar, fully Thomas Robert "Tommy" Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar
An honest confession is good for the soul, but bad for the reputation
That balancing moment at which pleasure would allure, and conscience is urging us to refrain, may be regarded as the point of departure or divergency whence one or other of the two processes (towards evil, or towards good) take their commencement. Each of them consists in a particular succession of ideas, with their attendant feelings; and whichever of them may happen to be described once has, by the law of suggestion, the greater chance, in the same circumstances, of being described over again. Should the mind dwell on an object of allurement, and the considerations of principle not be entertained, it will pass inward from the first incitement to the final and guilty indulgence by a series of stepping-stones, each of which will present itself more readily in future, and with less chance of arrest or interruption by the suggestions of conscience than before.
Affront | Appetite | Children | Father | Forgiveness | God | Heaven | Imagination | Men | Right | Spirit | Will | Forgiveness | God |
Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joints, but so many Wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, Man.
Imagination | Impression | Man | Memory | Mind | Object | Reading | Time |
Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgment are the same thing, and as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous.
Anger | Beginning | Body | Cause | Desire | Dreams | Imagination | Kindness | Lying | Thought | Thought |