This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disentrall ourselves.
Difficulty | Past | Present | Quiet | Think |
François Mitterand, fully François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterand
I believe in the virtue of traditions, and I recall having often spoken this phrase: “Memory is revolutionary.” If one has the ambition of preparing the century to come, breaking with the past or being ignorant of its amounts to cutting one’s own roots and drying up on the spot.
A single word of gratefulness can transform a moment of sorrow into a moment of peace.
Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you would let go of today?
Energy | Fear | Life | Life | Order | Pain | Past | Learn | Old |
Gratefulness arises naturally from this fertile balance of honoring both our sorrow and our joy. We name our sorrows so that we can bring care and attention to our wounds, so that we may heal. And at the same time we give thanks for the innumerable gifts and blessings bestowed upon us daily, lest we forget how rich we are.
Attention | Balance | Blessings | Care | Joy | Sorrow | Time |
Eternity is another word for unity. In it, past and future are not apart; here is everywhere, and now goes on forever. The opposite of eternity is diffusion not time. Eternity does not begin when time is at its end. Time is eternity broken into space, like a ray of light refracted in the water… unity is a task, not a condition. The world lies in strife, in discord, in divergence. Unity is beyond not within reality.
Eternity | Future | Light | Past | Reality | Space | Time | Unity | World |
Before reaching us, divine revelation has passed through social contests whose coloring it tended to assume; and to catch its spirit it is often necessary to relive the past and breathe its atmosphere.
Past | Revelation | Spirit |
The sum of total worldly possessions is nothing but sorrow and evil.
Evil | Nothing | Possessions | Sorrow |
Four things come not back - the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
Life | Life | Opportunity | Past |
Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye. Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.
Past |
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
The future is hidden from us, but the past warns us that the world in the end belongs to the unworldly.
We know of four different languages today where there is not a negative word in the language, there is not a word in the past tense, or a word in the future; tense. All is here and now. Negative words, feelings, conditions have absolutely no power except what we individually give to them. The moment we cease feeding our energy into them they no longer have life, and thus they cease to exist.
Energy | Feelings | Future | Language | Life | Life | Past | Power | Words |
Depression boils down to one of two things: either dwelling excessively on the past or fantasizing excessively about the future. They have no present. Living in the past or living in the future produces a spiritual and emotional numbness to the present. And a depressed person chooses that numbness over facing the pain of the present.
Depression | Future | Pain | Past | Present |