This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Life is an island in an ocean of loneliness, an island whose rocks are hopes, whose trees are dreams, whose flowers are solitude, and whose brooks are thirst. Your life, my fellow men, is an island separated from all other islands and regions. No matter how many are the ships that leave your shores for other climes, no matter how many are the fleets that touch your coast, you remain a solitary island, suffering the pangs of loneliness and yearning for happiness. You are unknown to your fellow men and far removed from their sympathy and understanding." - Kahlil Gibran
"How ignorant are those who see, without question, the abstract existence of some of their senses, but insist upon doubting until that existence reveals itself to all their senses. Is not faith the sense of the heart as truly as sight is the sense of the eye?... How strange is the one who dreams in truth of a beautiful reality, and then, when he endeavours to fashion it into form but cannot succeed, doubts the dream and blasphemes the reality and distrusts the beauty!" - Kahlil Gibran
"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and through they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth." - Kahlil Gibran
"Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity." - Kahlil Gibran
"You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls. For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, even in your dreams." - Kahlil Gibran
"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"The most generous dreams of the past have not become immediate practical necessities: a word-wide cooperation of people, a more just distribution of al the goods of life; the use of knowledge and energy or the service of life, and the use of life itself for the extension of the human spirit to provinces where human values and purposes could not heretofore penetrate. If we awaken in time to overcome the automatisms and irrational compulsions that are now pushing nations toward destruction, we shall create a universal community." - Lewis Mumford
"Seem like God don’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile." - Lorraine Hansberry
"Spirituality is best manifested on the ground, not in the air. Rapturous day-dreams, flights of heavenly fancy, longings to see the Invisible, are less expensive and less expressive than the plain doing of duty... Spirituality is seeing God in common things, and showing God in common tasks." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality. The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account. Recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual's purpose merges with the universal flow." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Cherish your vision and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blue prints of your ultimate achievements." - Napoleon Hill
"Remember that when you are unhappy it is generally because you do not visualize strongly enough the great things that you definitely want to accomplish in life, nor do you employ steadfastly enough your will power, your creative ability, and your patience until your dreams are materialized." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"No heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams." - Paulo Coelho
"Life is a Dream. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story, and the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams." - Pedro Calderón de la Barca, fully Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Barreda González de Henao Ruiz de Blasco y Riaño
"The enduring value of the relationship to the land might be best measured by the extent to which it evolves beyond self-interest. All healthy relationships entail sacrifice and are never solely about what makes one person feel good, but are about what’s also good for someone else. Relationship implies a responsibility that goes beyond one’s own dreams." - Peter Forbes
"The enduring value of the relationship to the land might best be measured by the extent to which it evolves beyond self-interest. All healthy relationships entail sacrifice and are never solely about what makes one person feel good, but are about what's also good for someone else. Relationship implies a responsibility that goes beyond one's own dreams." - Peter Forbes
"Dreams are rudiments of the great state to come. We dream what is about to happen." - Philip James Bailey
"I believe in a spiritual world not as something separate from this world, but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw, we must feel this truth that we are living in God. Born in this great world, full of the mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as a momentary outburst of chance, drifting on the current of matter toward an eternal nowhere. We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature, which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality." -
"Dreams retain the infirmities of our character." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are not better than dreams." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, driveling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions; the surest poison is time. This cup which nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science; especially it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Good thoughts are no better than good dreams if you don’t follow through." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The soul contains in itself the event that shall presently befall it, for the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts. It is no wonder that particular dreams and presentiments should fall out and be prophetic." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge; that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts; that hope always triumphs over experience; that laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe love is stronger than death." - Robert Fulghum, fully Robert Lee Fulghum
"Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity." - Robert Fulghum, fully Robert Lee Fulghum
"If you are not fueling your dreams, you are fueling your limitations." - Robin Sharma
"Troubles are usually the brooms and shovels that smooth the road to a good man’s fortune, of which he little dreams; and many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away hunger." - Saint Basil, aka Basil of Caesarea, Saint Basil the Great NULL
"Rest and unrest derive from illusion; with enlightenment there is no liking and disliking. All dualities come from ignorant inference. They are like dreams of flowers in air: foolish to try to grasp them. Gain and loss, right and wrong: such thoughts must finally be abolished at once." - Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
"If the eye never sleeps, all dreams will naturally cease. If the mind makes no discriminations, then ten thousand things are as they are, of single essence. to understand the mystery of this One-essence is to be released from all entanglements. When all things are seen equally the timeless Self-essence is reached. No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state." - Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
"All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds awake to find that it was vanity; But dreamers of day are dangerous men, that they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible." - T. E. Lawrence, fully Thomas Edward Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia
"If you will it, it is no legend. But if you do not will it, then it remains a legend which I have recited. Dreams and action are not as widely separated as many believe. All acts of men were dreams at first and become dreams again." - Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
"Whether or not the philosophers care to admit that we have a soul, it seems obvious that we are equipped with something or other which generates dreams and ideals, and which sets up values." - Thomas Erskine, aka Thomas Erskine of Linlathen
"Art teaches us to respect imagination as something far beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul... Leonardo da Vinci asks an interesting question in one of his notebooks: "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" One answer is that the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could, with some effort of imagination, glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events. Dream teaches us to look with that other eye, the eye that in waking life belongs to the artist, to each of us as artist... Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity." - Thomas Moore
"We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams come true." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"All our dreams can come true - if we have the courage to pursue them." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"In dreams begins responsibility." - William Butler Yeats
"We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb is taken off from our passions, and our imagination wanders at will. When awake, we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams, when we are off guard, they return securely and unbidden." - William Hazlitt
"Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried." - William Shakespeare
"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; no more; and, by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life; for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?" - William Shakespeare
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and out little life is rounded with sleep. We know what we are, but know not what we may be." - William Shakespeare
"Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold of so airy and light a quality, that it is but a shadow’s shadow." - William Shakespeare
"Goals are dreams we convert to plans and take action to fulfill." - Zig Ziglar, born Hilary Hinton Ziglar
"This span of life was lent for lofty duties; not for selfishness; not to be whiled away in aimless dreams, but to improve ourselves and serve mankind." - Aubrey de Vere, fully Aubrey Albericus de Vere NULL