This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.
In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate.
Force | Perception | Science | Will | Woman |
If you wish the world to become loving and compassionate, become loving and compassionate yourself. If you wish to diminish fear in the world, diminish your own. These are the gifts that you can give.
Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.
Good | Imagination | Reason |
Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
Gratefulness on the part of the recipient spurs on the giver to bestow gifts larger than before. He who embezzles petty things is also false and fraudulent concerning things of importance.
No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. It’s a shame to waste those by doing what someone else has done.
If far-reaching discoveries regarding the nature of matter and energy and the laws which govern the Universe have been made and worked on by civilizations that have disappeared, and if some of them have been preserved throughout the ages (which is by no means certain) this could only have been done by people of superior intelligence and in a language necessarily incomprehensible to the ordinary man. If, however, we reject this hypothesis we can nevertheless imagine, from one age to another, a succession of beings of exceptional gifts able to communicate with one another. Such beings are well aware that it is not in their interests to display their powers openly.
Age | Display | Energy | Hypothesis | Intelligence | Language | Means | Nature | People | Universe | Govern |
You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
Danger | Good | Little | Need | Power | Will | Talent | Danger |
Madame Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon
O my God, how true it is that we may have of Thy gifts and yet may be full of ourselves.
My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.
I was taught that the world had a lot of problems; that I could struggle and change them; that intellectual and material gifts brought the privilege and responsibility of sharing with others less fortunate; and that service is the rent each of us pays for living -- the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time or after you have reached your personal goals
Change | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility | Service | Struggle | Time | World | Privilege |
Manage the remarkable balance between acting from your heart and close to your gifts with completing the obligations that your labor and tasks require of you. Leverage opportunity AND seize joy.
Balance | Heart | Labor | Opportunity |
God doesn’t want us because of what we have to offer him; he wants us because he has everything to offer us. God doesn’t want you because you have certain gifts to offer. He wants to give you gifts so that you then can offer them to other people.
May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.
Great men are not the mere products of the times in which they live, the epitome of their age, the creations of those formative currents of thought that are traversing the masses. Great men are the gifts of kind heaven to our poor world; instruments by which the Highest One works out His designs; light-radiators to give guidance and blessing to the travellers of time. Though far above us, they are felt to be our brothers; and their elevation shows us what vast possibilities are wrapped up in our common humanity. They beckon us up the gleaming heights to whose summits they have climbed. Their deeds are the woof of this world's history.
Deeds | Guidance | Heaven | Men | Thought | Deeds | Guidance | Thought |