This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit. In fact there has been a good deal of a demand for unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change. As a people we have the right and the duty, second to moral law, of requiring and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible of development hereafter.
Change | Children | Duty | Future | Good | Individual | Justice | Law | Moral law | Past | People | Present | Right | Time | Waste |
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 |
Give us, oh, give us, the man who sings at his work! He will do more in the same time, he will do it better, he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of fatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation in its powers of endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful, must be uniformly joyous, a spirit all sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright.
Better | Cheerfulness | Endurance | Harmony | Man | Music | Past | Spirit | Strength | Time | Will | Work |
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.
Cheerfulness | Endurance | Past | Strength |
William A. Ward, fully William Arthur Ward
We always expect love to be healing and whole, and then are astonished to find that it can create hollow gaps and empty failures... Our love and our high expectations that it will somehow make life complete seem to be an integral part of the experience. Love seems to promise that life's gaping wounds will close up and heal. It makes little difference that in the past love has shown itself to be painful and disturbing. There is something self-renewing in love.
Experience | Life | Life | Little | Love | Past | Promise | Self | Will |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
On the stage it is always now, the personages are standing on that razor-edge between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.
The little that we know of God seems so precious that we grasp it as if it were the whole. We set up our narrow standards and build our protecting bulwarks to guard what we have won against the mutation of the years. And we forget that God is the living God, everywhere present, in the changing as in the permanent; in the future as in the past and in the present.
If we can get past various fundamentalist attitudes about the spiritual life, such as attachment to a too simple code of morality, fixed interpretations of stories, and a community in which individual thinking is not prized, then many different ways of being spiritual come into view. We may discover that there are ways to be spiritual that do not counter the soul's need for body, individuality, imagination and exploration. Eventually we might find that all emotions, all human activities, and all spheres of life have deep roots in the mysteries of the soul, and therefore are holy.
Body | Emotions | Imagination | Individual | Individuality | Life | Life | Morality | Need | Past | Soul | Thinking |
Every moment can be viewed as new... You cause yourself a great loss by not living in the present... Don’t let the past weigh you down... Realize what is over is over... The future is always an unknown entity so learn to focus on the present... Learn to concentrate on what you are presently doing... Always try to utilize your present moments for growth... If you master feeling joy in your present moments, you need never be concerned you are missing anything, since whatever you are engaged in can be transformed into an elevating experience... You can alleviate pain by living in the present.
Cause | Experience | Focus | Future | Growth | Joy | Need | Pain | Past | Present | Loss | Learn |
I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started
Émile Durkheim, fully David Émile Durkheim
The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. But the man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against the present's afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of hastily experienced stages. What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon.
Comfort | Difficulty | Expectation | Future | Knowing | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Past | Present | Wise | Expectation | Happiness |
Doris Kearns Goodwin, born Doris Helen Kearns
The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied with our present condition or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Hence the ardour of the selfish to better their fortunes, and to add to their personal accomplishments; and hence the zeal of the patriot and philosopher to advance the virtue and the happiness of the human race. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes.
Better | Destroy | Enjoyment | Excellence | Human race | Imagination | Improvement | Man | Mind | Past | Present | Race | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Zeal | Happiness |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
To possess, is past the instant we achieve the joy - immortality contented were anomaly.
Immortality | Joy | Past |