This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
George Douglas Brown, pseud. Kennedy King
Immortality! We bow before the very term. Immortality! Before its reason staggers, calculation reclines her tired head, and imagination folds her weary pinions. Immortality! It throws open the portals of the vast forever; it puts the crown of deathless destiny upon every human brow; it cries to every uncrowned king of men, “Live forever, crowned for the empire of a deathless destiny!”
Destiny | Imagination | Immortality | Men | Reason | Wisdom |
The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a mark of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and makes real advances in science.
Imagination | Problems | Regard | Science | Skill | Wisdom | Old |
To waken interest and kindle enthusiasm is the sure way to teach easily and successfully.
Enthusiasm | Teach | Wisdom |
We are weak today in ideal matters because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philosophy shall have co-operated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of philosophy in days of transition.
Aspiration | Events | Force | Imagination | Intelligence | Life | Life | Meaning | Philosophy | Poetry | Practice | Revelation | Science | Will | Wisdom | Circumstance |
B. C. Forbes, fully Bertie Charles "B.C." Forbes
Enthusiasm is the electric current that keeps the engine of life going at top speed. Enthusiasm is the very propeller of progress.
Enthusiasm | Life | Life | Progress | Wisdom |
Thomas Erskine, Lord Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine
The body travels more easily than the mind, and until we have limbered up our imagination we continue to think as though we had stayed home. We have not really budged a step until we take up residence in someone else's point of view.
Body | Imagination | Mind | Wisdom | Think |
Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
Enthusiasm | Indifference | Wisdom |
Ralph Gerard, fully Ralph Waldo Gerard
How to teach rigor while preserving imagination is an unsolved challenge to education.
Challenge | Education | Imagination | Teach | Wisdom |
There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.
Imagination | Nothing | Taste | Wisdom |
Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"
An uncontrolled imagination may become as surely intoxicated by over-indulgence as a toper may do bodily with strong drink.
Imagination | Indulgence | Wisdom |
There is nothing in man that must be held in check as the imagination - the most mobile and most dangerous of all our capacities.
Imagination | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out of itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.
Appearance | Events | Ideas | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Power | Reality | Time | Vision | Wisdom |
Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine
Nature has given women two painful but heavenly gifts, which distinguish them, and often raise them above human nature - compassion and enthusiasm. By compassion, they devote themselves; by enthusiasm they exalt themselves.
Compassion | Distinguish | Enthusiasm | Human nature | Nature | Wisdom |