This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
Edgar Cayce, known as the "Sleeping Prophet"
The alternative to recalling and interpreting dreams is not always pleasant. Individuals cannot expect to drift forever. If they do not puzzle out their identity, and the direction of their lives by the aid of their dreams, then they may be brought, by the relentless action of their own pent-up souls, into some crisis which requires that they come to terms with themselves. It may be a medical crisis. It may be the end of a marriage or of a job. It may be depression or withdrawal.
Action | Aid | Depression | Dreams | Marriage | Wisdom | Crisis |
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds.
And all your dreams and other such like folly, to deep oblivion let them be consigned; for they arise but from your melancholy, by which your health is being undermined. A straw for all the meaning you can find in dreams! They aren’t worth a hill of beans, for no one knows what dreaming really means.
Dreams | Folly | Health | Meaning | Means | Melancholy | Oblivion | Wisdom | Worth |
Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivises. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating.
Dreams | Fear | Hate | Liberty | Popularity | Wisdom | Learn |
We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.
Bad books are like intoxicating drinks; they furnish neither nourishment, nor medicine. Both improperly excite; the one the mind; the other by body. The desire for each increases by being fed. Both ruin; one the intellect; the other the health; and together, the soul. The safeguard against each is the same - total abstinence from all that intoxicates either body or mind.
Abstinence | Body | Books | Desire | Health | Mind | Soul | Wisdom |
In the first place, the human mind, no matter how highly trained, is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many tongues. The little child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind to God. And because I believe this, I am not an atheist.
Books | God | Little | Mind | Order | Plan | Universe | Wisdom | Child | Understand |
Think as well as read, and when you read. Yield not your minds to the passive impressions which others may make upon them. Hear what they have to say; but examine it, weight it, and judge for yourselves. This will enable you to make a right use of books - to use them as helpers, not as guides to your understanding; as counselors, not as dictators of what you are to think and believe.
Lord Dunsany, fully Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany
Man knows his littleness; his own mountains remind him; but the dreams of man make up for our faults and failings; for the brevity of our lives, for the narrowness of our scope; they leap over boundaries and are away and away.
A dream is incorrectly interpreted if the interpretation leaves the dreamer unmoved and disappointed. Dreams come to expand, not to diminish us.
Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
We live too much in books and not enough in nature, and we are very much like the simpleton of a Pliny the Younger, who went on studying a Greek author while before his eyes Vesuvius was overwhelming five cities beneath the ashes.
Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
I have ever gained the most profit, and the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise in my affections.
Books | Memory | Pleasure | Understanding | Wisdom | Think |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
Books | Ecstasy | Good | People | Reading | Remorse | Sorrow | Will | Wisdom |
Crawford Greenewalt, fully Crawford Hallock Greenewalt
Behind every advance of the human race is a germ of creation growing in the mind of some long individual. An individual whose dreams waken him in the night while others lie contentedly asleep.
Dreams | Human race | Individual | Mind | Race | Wisdom |
Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal.