This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Rabbi Eliezer ben Isaac Papo, aka "ha-Kosesh" or "The Saint"
By analyzing your worries, you will become aware that all worry is useless. Worries fall into two categories: worrying about the past and worrying about the future. As regards to the past, worry will not change the situation. You are compounding your suffering or loss by your present worrying. If you are worrying about something that might happen in the future, do what you can to protect yourself and prevent a loss. If there is nothing you can do, all your worrying will make no difference. So why waste your present moments worrying?
Change | Character | Future | Nothing | Past | Present | Suffering | Waste | Will | Worry | Loss |
A teacher should give his pupil opportunity for independent practice without suggestions from himself, and thus set upon him the stamp of indelible memory in its purest form.
Character | Memory | Opportunity | Practice | Teacher |
Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body: even as things are, addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and clearing away, memory will often revive. The soul is stability; the shifting and fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only of its forgetting not of its remembering - Lethe stream may be understood in this sense - and memory is a fact of the soul.
Body | Cause | Character | Forgetfulness | Memory | Sense | Soul | Will |
To be rich, to be famous? do these profit a year hence, when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under ground, along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? But only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessings or pervades you, and intercedes for you. Non omnis moriar, if, dying, nor am lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.
Blessings | Character | Famous | Love | Memory | Soul | Sound |
Mary Antin, fully Mary Antin Grabau
It is not I that belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me.
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
At any rate it is now quite clear that neither future nor past actually exists. Nor is it right to say that there are times, past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation.
Expectation | Future | Memory | Mind | Past | Present | Right | Wisdom |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
You define the present in an arbitrary manner as that which is, whereas the present is simply what is being made. Nothing is less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet; and when we think it as existing, it is already past.
Future | Nothing | Past | Present | Wisdom | Think | Understand |
Do not grieve. Misfortunes will happen to the wisest and best of men. Death will come, always out of season. It is the command of the Great Spirit, and all nations and people must obey. What is past and what cannot be prevented should not be grieved for... Misfortunes do not flourish particularly in our lives - they grow everywhere.
Death | Men | Nations | Past | People | Spirit | Will | Wisdom |
Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch
There is no more dangerous misconception than this which misconstrues the arms race as the cause rather than a symptom of the tensions and divisions which threaten nuclear war. If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament - disarmament follows peace.