This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again. So let's remember: Don't try to saw sawdust.
Dudjom Rinpoche, fully Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche or Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje NULL
Action is being truly observant of your own thoughts, good or bad, looking into the true nature of whatever thoughts may arise, neither tracing the past nor inviting the future, neither allowing any clinging to experiences of joy, nor being overcome by sad situations. In so doing, you try to reach and remain in the state of great equilibrium, where all good and bad, peace and distress, are devoid of true identity.
Action | Distress | Future | Good | Joy | Nature | Past | Peace |
Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils, but present evils triumph over it.
Future | Past | Philosophy | Present |
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 |
With every rising of the sun, think of your life as just begun. The past has shrived and buried deep all yesterdays; there let them sleep. Concern yourself with but today, woo it, and teach it to obey your will and wish. Since time began today has been the friend of man; but in his blindness and his sorrow, he looks to yesterday and tomorrow. You, and today! a soul sublime, and the great pregnant hour of time, with God himself to bind the twain! Go forth, I say - attain, attain! With God himself to bind the twain.
Friend | God | Life | Life | Looks | Man | Past | Sorrow | Soul | Teach | Time | Tomorrow | Will | God | Think |
(A dying person) – The hardest part is that everyone sees me in the past tense. No matter what is going on with my body, I will still be a whole person.
It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations - past and present - are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hunger, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia. Thus, we are up against the paradox that the individual who is more complex, unpredictable, and mysterious than any communal entity is the one nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship. If in some manner the voice of an individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves.
Dreams | Hunger | Individual | Paradox | Past | Present | Time | Understanding |
Learn from your mistakes, but don't cry over them. We best redeem the past by forgetting it.
Past |
Guilt binds us to the darkest part of ourselves… Shame and guilt are deeply connected… Guilt and time are closely connected, too. Since guilt always comes from the past, it keeps the past alive… Only when you release your guilt do you truly release your past to create a new future.
Th' past always looks betther thin it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here.
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
The history of past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.
The period of time covered by history is far too short to allow any perceptible progress in the popular sense of Evolution of the Human Species. The notion that there has been any such Progress since Caesar’s time (less than 20th centuries ago) is too absurd for discussion. All the savagery, barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it of which we have any record as existing in the past exists at the present moment.
Absurd | Barbarism | Discussion | Evolution | History | Past | Present | Progress | Rest | Sense | Time |
I wonder whether even in the past total victory was not really an illusion from the standpoint of the victors. In a sense, there is not total victory short of genocide, unless it be a victory over the minds of men. But the total military victories are rarely victories over the minds of men.