This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
Time present and time past are both perhaps time future. And time future contained in the time passed. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction remaining of a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been point to one end which is always present. Foot falls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened to the rose garden. My words echo in your mind.
Future | Memory | Mind | Past | Present | Speculation | Time | Words | World |
What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it.
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Tomorrow’s memory depends upon today’s impressions... Your memory builds your personality, your personality builds your character, and your character determines your destiny.
Character | Destiny | Memory | Personality | Tomorrow |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
It must be a peace without victory... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just.
Equality | Memory | Mind | Nations | Peace | Resentment | Rest | Right | Sacrifice |
Though God is everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul. the natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of his habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth of thee from whence all these faculties come forth, as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of the tree. This depth is the unity, the eternity - I had almost said the infinity - of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it rest but the infinity of God.
Body | Eternity | God | Memory | Nothing | Present | Rest | Soul | Understanding | Unity | Will | God |
Despair over loneliness will increase the suffering. Looking at the time available as a precious gift will decrease it.
Despair | Loneliness | Suffering | Time | Will |
Chief Seattle, also spelled Seathl
What is man without beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
His eloquent tongue so well seconds his fertile invention that no one speaks better when suddenly called forth. His attention never languishes; his mind is always before his words; his memory has all its stock so turned into ready money that, without hesitation or delay, it supplies whatever the occasion may require.
Attention | Better | Delay | Invention | Memory | Mind | Money | Words |
Let us examine more closely the significance of this vague word, reality. It may have several meanings, according to the different points of view which one takes. We may regard it as embodied in the physical world, the world of land and sea, of sky and trees, of sunshine and of storm. The real therefore will be to us that which we can touch and see, smell and taste, as one will say, "I know that is real for I can see it with my eyes." Seeing is believing, and the testimony of the senses is the superior court of appeal in controverted questions. But the world of reality may be regarded from quite a different point of view, as the world of consciousness, the mind of man, the experiences of the inner self, the Ego. Here is a world of phenomena interrelated and reciprocally dependent. It is a realm of ideas, of memory images, of fancy, of will, and of desire. The verities in this world cannot be seen, or measured, or weighed, and yet we do not hesitate to speak of them as realities; they are real as the love of friends is real, or the anger of a foe. The passion of a Romeo, the will of a Napoleon, the genius of a Goethe ... these are realities.
Anger | Consciousness | Desire | Ego | Genius | Ideas | Land | Love | Man | Memory | Mind | Passion | Phenomena | Reality | Regard | Self | Taste | Will | World | Friends |
There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
Failure | Loneliness | Failure |
I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.
All that happens in one place happens also in other places; all that happened at one time happens also at all times after that. Nothing is “local,” limited to where and when it is happening. All things are global, indeed cosmic, for the memory of all things extends to all places and all times.
Grandma Moses, By name of Anna Mary Robertson Moses
A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
Georges Florovsky, fully Georges Vasilievich Florovsky
Orthodoxy is summoned to witness. Now more than ever the Christian West stands before divergent prospects, a living question addressed also to the Orthodox world… The ‘old polemical theology' has long ago lost its inner connection with any reality. Such theology was an academic discipline, and was always elaborated according to the same western 'textbooks.' A historiosophical exegesis of the western religious tragedy must become the new 'polemical theology.' But this tragedy must be reendured and relived, precisely as one's own, and its potential catharsis must be demonstrated in the fullness of the experience of the Church and patristic tradition. In this newly sought Orthodox synthesis, the centuries-old experience of the Catholic West must be studied and diagnosed by Orthodox theology with greater care and sympathy than has been the case up to now… The Orthodox theologian must also offer his own testimony to this world—a testimony arising from the inner memory of the Church—and resolve the question with his historical findings.
Care | Church | Experience | Memory | Question | Sympathy | Theology | Tragedy |
But there is always a beautiful way to say everything. Nothing so cuts into one's heart as a mis-spoken word that falls clumsily. Rarely, perhaps, the hurt was meant at all. Nevertheless when a word has gone from the lips, it cannot be recalled. Yours may go, but so long as memory lives, the scar of a mis-spoken word may remain.
The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.
Loneliness | Soul |
I. L. Peretz, fully Isaac Leib Peretz, aka Yitskhok Leybush Pertez
A people's memory is history. A people without a history can grow neither wiser nor better.
Hilaire Belloc, fully Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc
When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.
Loneliness | Men | Space | World | Friendship |