This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes and the first that dies.
The only God whom our thoughts can rest on, our hearts cling to, and our conscience can recognize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls.
Conscience | God | Rest | God |
If we could wake each morning with no memory of living before we went to sleep, we might arrive at a faultless day, once in a great many.
Unselfish and noble acts are the most radiant epochs in the biography of souls. When wrought in earliest youth, they lie in the memory of age like the coral islands, green and sunny, amidst the melancholy waste of ocean.
Age | Melancholy | Memory | Waste | Youth |
Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
No man can always be right. So the struggle is to do one’s best; to keep the brain and conscience clear; never to be swayed by unworthy motives or inconsequential reasons, but to strive to unearth the basic factors involved and then do one’s duty.
A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
Memory |
Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society are produced by the restraints which the necessary, but unequal, laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood.
Contention | Despair | Fear | Force | Future | History | Humanity | Love | Man | Mankind | Memory | Mind | Motives | Nature | Past | Peace | Pity | Power | Pride | Property | Silence | Society | Submission | Success | Society |
Commit the Golden Rule to memory - now commit it to life.
Golden Rule | Life | Life | Memory | Rule | Golden Rule |
Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.
Conscience | Individual | Judgment | Nothing | Responsibility |
Imagination I understand to be the representation of an individual thought. Imagination is of three kinds: joined with belief of that which is to come; joined with memory of that which is past; and of things present.
Belief | Imagination | Individual | Memory | Past | Present | Thought | Understand |
The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wronged, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them or else leave the door open to self-contempt.
Conscience | Contempt | Hate | Pity | Punishment | Self | Silence | Guilty |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
When we speak of conscience, it may easily be thought that in virtue of its form, which is abstract inwardness, conscience is at this point without more ado true conscience. But true conscience determines itself to will what is absolutely good and obligatory and is this self-determination.
Abstract | Conscience | Determination | Good | Self | Self-determination | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Thought |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways... But besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them, and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul or my self. By which words I do not denote any of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consist in being perceived.
Existence | Ideas | Imagination | Knowledge | Memory | Mind | Self | Soul | Spirit | Words |
Gerald Brenan, fully Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan
A bad memory is the mother of invention.