This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The finest gift you can give anyone is encouragement. Yet, almost no one gets the encouragement they need to grow to their full potential. If everyone received the encouragement they need to grow, the genius in most everyone would blossom and the world would produce abundance beyond the wildest dreams." - Sidney Madwed
"Freedom is not an ideal it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set - and this in a world where half our fellow man have less than enough to eat." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson
"Happiness is not external; it is not a function of what one does or does not. Happiness is in the attitude that one brings to everything one does... So if we create our own happiness, what should we be aiming toward? The answer: happiness is the fulfillment of our dreams, the accomplishment of what we set out to do, living our lives as we want to live them... Happiness, then, can reside in the carrying out of the myriad everyday tasks that we all take for granted, with one very small, but significant difference. Outwardly, we may be doing what we always do, but inwardly, our entire being is immersed and engaged more fully n each and every action, a condition known as mindfulness." -
"Happiness is not external; it is not a function of what one does or does not. Happiness is in the attitude that one brings to everything one does... So if we create our own happiness, what should we be aiming toward? The answer: happiness is the fulfillment of our dreams, the accomplishment of what we set out to do, living our lives as we want to live them... Happiness, then, can reside in the carrying out of the myriad everyday tasks that we all take for granted, with one very small, but significant difference. Outwardly, we may be doing what we always do, but inwardly, our entire being is immersed and engaged more fully n each and every action, a condition known as mindfulness." - Alan Epstein
"More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheeps or goats that nourish a blind life within the brain, if, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way bound by gold chains about the feet of God." -
"What the psychoanalysts stress, the relation between dreams and our conscious acts, is what poets already know. The poets walk this bridge with ease, from conscious to unconscious, physical reality to psychological reality." - Anaïs Nin, born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell
"Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives." - Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
"We should train our desires to show the way to our dreams." - Author Unknown NULL
"There is not much to do but bury a man when the last of his dreams are dead." - Author Unknown NULL
"To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out for another is to risk involvement. To expose our feelings is to risk exposing our true self. To place your ideas and dreams before the crowd is to risk loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk despair. To try at all is to risk failure. But risk we must, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The man, the woman who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing." - Author Unknown NULL
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." - Author Unknown NULL
"You should never let your fears become the boundaries of your dreams." - Author Unknown NULL
"Art is not based on actuality, but on the wishes, dreams and aspirations of a people." - Bernard Berenson
"Never the spirit born; the spirit shall cease to be never; never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams! Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever; Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another." - Blaise Pascal
"When one goes to sleep, he takes along the material of this all-containing world, himself tears it apart, himself builds it up, and dreams by his own brightness, by his own light. Then this person becomes self-illuminated. There are no chariots there, no spans, no roads. But he projects from himself chariots, spans, roads… for he is a creator." - Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad
"Real wealth is determined by the level of your ability to live our your dreams." - Charles J. Givens
"There is little in common between us. The ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their final resting place is hallowed ground, while you wander away from the tombs of your fathers without regret. Your religion was written on tablets of stone by the iron finger of an angry God, lest you might forget it. The red man could never remember nor comprehend it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given them by the Great Spirit, and the visions of our sachems [chiefs], and is written in the hearts of our people. Your dead cease to love you and the homes of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb. They wander far off beyond the stars, are soon forgotten, and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its winding rivers, its great mountains, and its sequestered vales." - Chief Seattle, also spelled Seathl
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams." - Elias Canetti
"[It is those who have not really lived - who have left issues unsettled, dreams unfulfilled, hopes shattered, and who have let the real things in life (loving and being loved by others, contributing in a positive way to the other people’s happiness and welfare, finding out what things are really you) pass them by - who are most reluctant to die." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations - past and present - are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hunger, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia. Thus, we are up against the paradox that the individual who is more complex, unpredictable, and mysterious than any communal entity is the one nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship. If in some manner the voice of an individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves." - Eric Hoffer
"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together." - Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu
"In general, whatever experience you have, whether dreams or real, if you cling to them as real, they will become an obstacle. If you know them as illusion, they become the path." - Gampopa, known as Sonam Rinchen from Gampo or Dagpo Lha-je from Gampo NULL
"Live in contact with dreams, and you will get something of their charm; live in contact with facts, and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country where the facts were not brutal, and the dreams not unreal." - George Bernard Shaw
"Sensations are rapid dreams." - George Santayana
"Dreams are the touchstones of our characters." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; there is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"[Friends] They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Our truest life is when are in dreams awake." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Dreams or illusions, call them what you will. They lift us from the commonplace life to better things." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built... Dreams are the seedlings of reality." -
"If we listen to our self-love, we shall estimate our lot less by; what it is than by what it is not; shall dwell upon its hindrances and be blind to its possibilities; and, comparing it only with imaginary lives, shall indulge in flattering dreams of what we should do if we had but power, and give if we had but wealth, and be if we had no temptations." - James Martineau
"The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice. Where that purpose does not exist, to give definiteness, precision, and an intelligible meaning to thought, it generates nothing better than the mystical metaphysics of the Pythagoreans or the Vedas." - John Stuart Mill
"There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality." - Jonas Salk
"The Problem - Myth might be defined simply as "other people's religion," to which an equivalent definition of religion would be "misunderstood mythology"... Like dreams, myths are productions of the human imagination. Their images, consequently, though derived from the material world and its supposed history, are, like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts of the human will... Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors." - Joseph Campbell
"Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people's dreams - their visions, really - we are in the realm of the sacred" - Julia Cameron
"He who passes not his days in the realm of dreams is the slave of the days." - Kahlil Gibran