This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Our memories and our memory is the floating ice mountain. We see only the tip of the iceberg, and a huge underwater weight passed us, invisible and unreachable.
Memory |
Gratitude is the memory of the heart; therefore forget not to say often, I have all I have ever enjoyed.
Memory |
Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
Focus the place of worshp in your qalb, your inner heart. First you have to put your intention on Him in your qalb, then bring that intention to your memory which should be the focal point of attention. That focus must slip through feeling and feeling should become awareness of it. Understand what prayer is through that awareness which must flow through your blood and body; they must be associated with the Zikr, and as awareness exists in the blood, intellect must also function there. Iman, faith, certitude and determination, should be at work within the pointedness of intellect, and that prayer must function on the pointedness of iman in the three worlds, awaal, the time of creation, dunya, this world, and akhirah, the hereafter, because everything exists within man. This prayer should radiate through the tissues, the nerves, the marrow, through intention; focus your needs, this Zikr should flow through tissues, nerves, veins, blood, the body. When it does, that is prayer, that is devotion. Establish this thought, establish this intention, the Zikr must function like the pulse of blood in your arteries.
Awareness | Focus | Intention | Memory | Prayer | Time | Work | Awareness | Intellect | Understand |
Muhammed al-Taqī or Muhammad al-Jawād, given name Muhammad ibn ‘Alī ibn Mūsā
Modesty is the decoration of poverty, thanks-giving is the decoration of affluence and wealth. Patience and endurance are the ornaments and decorations of calamities and distress. Humility is the decoration of lineage, and eloquence is the decoration of speech. Committing to memory is the decoration of tradition (hadīth), and bowing the shoulders is the decoration of knowledge. Decency and good morale is the decoration of the mind, and a smiling face is the decoration of munifence and generiosity. Not boasting of doing favours is the decoration of good deeds, and humility is the decoration of service. Spending less is the decoration of contentment, and abondoning the meaningless and unnecessary things is the decoration of abstention and fear of God.
Boasting | Endurance | Fear | Good | Humility | Memory | Patience | Tradition |
Nachman of Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Bratslav, Nachman from Uman NULL
It is a great thing to hear music from a holy person playing on an instrument for the sake of heaven. Because through this, false fantasies are dismissed, the spirit of depression is dispelled, and the person merits happiness. Through this the memory is preserved, that is, the memory of the world to come, and a person is able to understand the hints that Hashem is constantly hinting to him everyday. Furthermore, through this a person can reach the level of the spirit of prophecy and divine inspiration, and he will be able to pour out his heart like water before Hashem.
Depression | Heart | Memory | Music | Prophecy | Spirit | Will | World | Understand |
N. Scott Momaday, fully Navarre Scott Momaday
At first she thought the writing would be easy. She was extremely confident in her ability to dream, to imagine, and she supposed that expressing her dreams in words, in writing, would be entirely natural, like drawing breath. She had read widely from the time she was a child, and she knew how to recognize something that was well written. She admired certain lines and passages so much that she had taken complete possession of them and committed them to memory. She could recite “The Gettysburg Address” and “The Twenty-Third Psalm.” She could recite “Jabberwocky” and Emily Dickinson’s “Further in summer that the birds” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” She knew by heart the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and if challenged she could say in whole the parts of both Romeo and Juliet. And she knew many Kiowa stories and many long prayers in Navajo. These were not feats of memory in the ordinary sense; it was simply that she attended to these things so closely that they became a part of her most personal experience. She had assumed them, appropriated them to her being. But to write! She discovered that was something else again.
Ability | Dreams | Heart | Memory | Thought | Time | Writing | Thought |
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
My true glory is not to have won 40 battles,... Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories.... But ... what will live forever, is my Civil Code.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
Ordinarily men exercise their memory much more than their judgment.
Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
She will take you life and all you are and all you care'st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She'll take your joy. And one day you'll wake and your heart and soul will have gone. A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.
Day | Heart | Life | Life | Memory | Nothing | Soul | Will |
Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.
When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked. After all, it was twenty-four hours later, and though I could remember the visit to the dentist, it was, at that time, only a memory of an experience, not an experience.
Anticipation | Magic | Memory | Wonder | Following |
The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labeling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.
The best memory is that which forgets nothing, but injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in the dust.
They gave her their lives, to her and to all of us, and for their own selves they won praises that never grow old, the most splendid of sepulchers — not the sepulchre in which their bodies are laid, but where their glory remains eternal in men's minds, always there on the right occasion to stir others to speech or to action. For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial: it is not only the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that mark diem out; no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people's hearts, their memory abides and grows. It is for you to try to be like them. Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
Earth | Eternal | Famous | Freedom | Glory | Memory | Men | Right | Speech | Happiness |
The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower; Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled, Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for?
Desire | Good | Immortality | Memory | Worth |
Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.
Beauty | Heart | Ideas | Instinct | Memory | Mystery | Sense | Beauty |