This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
Many adults draw childlike drawings and many children give up drawing at age nine or ten. These children grow up to become the adults who say they never could draw and can't even draw a straight line. The same adults, however, if questioned, often say that they would have liked to learn to draw well, just for their own satisfaction at solving the drawing problems that plagued them as children. But they felt that they had to stop drawing because they couldn't learn how to draw.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.
Aspiration | Will | Wisdom |
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.
Caution | Enjoyment | Life | Life | Means | Method | Need | Punishment | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
A man can hope for satisfaction and fulfillment only in what he does not yet possess; he cannot find pleasured in something of which he already has too much.
Fulfillment | Hope | Man | Wisdom |
Music is God’s best gift to man, the only art of heaven given to earth, the only art of earth that we take to heaven. But music, like all our gifts, is given us in the germ. It is for us to unfold and develop it by instruction and cultivation.
Art | Cultivation | Earth | God | Heaven | Man | Music | Wisdom | Instruction | Art |
Leonard Lauder, fully Leonard A. Lauder
The future is not a gift - it is an achievement.
Achievement | Future | Wisdom |
Compton Mackenzie, fully Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie
If I were a godfather wishing a gift on a child, it would be that he should always be more interested in other people than in himself. That's a real gift.
If you are to find rewarding satisfaction in your work, if your life is to be rich and purposeful and crowned with high achievement, it is important you continue to be a growing person. Education is a continuing process. It does not end with the termination of your schooling. Education continues from the beginning of life to the end of life, and balanced growth throughout one's entire life is important for every individual.
Achievement | Beginning | Education | Growth | Important | Individual | Life | Life | Wisdom | Work |
Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, not a quality; its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as the servant of the will. Imagination, as too often understood, is mere fantasy - the image-making power, common to all who have the gift of dreams.