This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely.
Absolute | Imagination | Worry |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
Disneyland would be a world of Americans, past and present, seen through the eyes of my imagination–a place of warmth and nostalgia, of illusion and color and delight.
Imagination | Will |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
As the original Mary Poppins budget of five million dollars continued to grow, I never saw a sad face around the entire Studio. And this made me nervous. I knew the picture would have to gross 10 million dollars for us to break even. But still there was no negative head-shaking. No prophets of doom. Even Roy was happy. He didn't even ask me to show the unfinished picture to a banker. The horrible thought struck me — suppose the staff had finally conceded that I knew what I was doing.
Imagination | Will |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.
Ideas | Imagination | Ingenuity | Tomorrow | Will | World | Ingenuity |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
Leadership means that a group, large or small, is willing to entrust authority to a person who has shown judgment, wisdom, personal appeal, and proven competence.
Dreams | Imagination |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
Every person has his own ideas of the act of praying for God's guidance, tolerance, and mercy to fulfill his duties and responsibilities. My own concept of prayer is not as a plea for special favors nor as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is a supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God.
Imagination | Blessed | Child |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
Whatever we accomplish is due to the combined effort. The organization must be with you or you don't get it done... In my organization there is respect for every individual, and we all have a keen respect for the public.
Imagination | Important | Mind | Reality | Spirit |
The book of Isaiah both appeals to the theological-ideological assumptions and places them in question because the facts on the ground tell otherwise. Thus the book of Isaiah and the larger Jerusalem tradition expose this difficult interface between theological claim and lived reality, a difficult interface that is front and center in the book of Job, a difficult interface that every pastor must face in the form of the theodicy question.
Courage | Failure | Imagination | Poetry | Spirit | Will | Failure | Old |
We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
Consciousness | Courage | Imagination | Need | Power | Think |
It may be the work of the church to name empire for what it is.
History | Imagination | People | Promise | Work |
In our modern experience, but probably also in every successful and affluent culture, it is believed that enough power and knowledge can tame the terror and eliminate the darkness. A "religion of orientation" fundamentally operates on that basis. But our honest experience, both personal and public, attests to the resilience of the darkness, in spite of us. The
Danger | Imagination | Wants | Danger |
The Many can elect after the Few have nominated.
Example | Government | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Sense | Will | Government |
The prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.
Culture | Future | Imagination | Vision |
For, surely, surely, where your voice and graces are, nothing of death can any feel or know.
Imagination | Youth | Youth |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body. Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not adventitious or contrived in oral communication, but is natural and even inevitable. In oral verbalization, particularly public verbalization, absolute motionlessness is itself a powerful gesture.
Imagination | Sound | Words | World | Writing |
As the vine which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs; so it is beautifully ordered by Providence, that woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart.
Family | Heart | Imagination | Lord | Money |
There is one in the world who feels for him who is sad a keener pang than he feels for himself; there is one to whom reflected joy is better than that which comes direct; there is one who rejoices in another's honor, more than in any which is one's own; there is one on whom another's transcendent excellence sheds no beam but that of delight; there is one who hides another's infirmities more faithfully than one's own; there is one who loses all sense of self in the sentiment of kindness, tenderness, and devotion to another; that one is woman.
Imagination | Nothing | World | Think |