This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
What’s so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster, and still do nothing in the present to stop it. The majority of people on this planet, they’re overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well being.
Imagination | Reality |
Charles F. Kettering, fully Charles Franklin Kettering
The Wright Brothers flew right through the smokescreen of impossibility.
Hope | Imagination |
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do.
Abstract | Common Sense | Difficulty | Discussion | Duty | Imagination | Pacifism | Rationality | Reason | Sense | Utopia | Think |
There is at present in the world a cold reserve that keeps man at a distance from man. There is an art in the practice of which individuals communicate forever, without anyone telling his neighbor what estimate he forms of his attainments and character, how they ought to be employed, and how to be improved. There is a sort of domestic tactics, the object of which is to elude curiosity, and keep up the tenor of conversation, without the disclosure either of our feelings or opinions. The friend of justice will have no object more deeply at heart than the annihilation of this duplicity. The man whose heart overflows with kindness for his species will habituate himself to consider, in each successive occasion of social intercourse, how that occasion may be most beneficently improved. Among the topics to which he will be anxious to awaken attention, politics will occupy a principal share.
Art | Chance | Circumstances | Degeneracy | Discovery | History | Imagination | Important | Improvement | Literature | Observation | Past | Philosophy | Practice | Superstition | Will | Discovery | Art |
What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
Day | Happy | Imagination | Man | People |
A pattern is either right or wrong.... It is no stronger than its weakest point.
I too will go, remembering what I said to you, when any land, the first to which we came seemed that we sought, and set your hearts aflame, and all seemed won to you: but still I think, perchance years hence, the fount of life to drink, unless by some ill chance I first am slain. But boundless risk must pay for boundless gain.
Happy | Imagination | Man | Memory | Men | Mind | Past | Pleasure | Soul | Will | Wills | Work | Think |
Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name
Imagination | Man | Men | Past |
Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips, think but one thought of me up in the stars.
Contempt | Imagination |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole.
Earth | Feelings | Imagination | People | Thinking | Thought | Parent | Thought |
Casuistry is the department of ethics, the great object of which is to lay down rules or canons for directing how to act wherever there is any room for doubt or hesitation.
O, wither’d is the garland of the war! The soldier’s pole is fall'n; young boys and girls are level now with men; the odds is gone, and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.
Appetite | Good | Imagination | Thinking |
Or ere I could Give him that parting kiss which I had set Betwixt two charming words--comes in my father, And like the tyrannous breathing of the north Shakes all our buds from growing.
Appetite | Imagination |
All history shows the power of blood over circumstances, as agriculture shows the power of the seeds over the soil.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
They don't take the Bible as a general thing, sailors don't; though I will say that I never saw the man at sea who didn't give it the credit of being an uncommon good yarn.
Dreams | Imagination | Little | Rest | Will | World | Worth |