This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Any living thing which triumphs in the struggle against its environment destroys itself.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
In that continuity of becoming which is reality itself, the present moment is constituted by the quasi-instantaneous section effected by our perception in the flowing mass; and this section is precisely that which we call the material world. Our bodies occupies its centre; it is, in this material world, that part of which we directly feel the flux; in its actual state the actuality of our present lies.
Perception | Present | Reality | Wisdom | World |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
The tools of the mind become burdens when the environment which made them necessary no longer exists.
Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch
Recipe for success: Be polite, prepare yourself for whatever you are asked to do, keep yourself tidy, be cheerful, don't be envious, be honest with yourself so you will be honest with others, be helpful, interest yourself in your job, don't pity yourself, be quick to praise, be loyal to your friends, avoid prejudices, be independent, interest yourself in politics, and read the newspapers.
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 |
Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker
We live in an environment whose principal product is garbage. The shined shoe in such a society is a hypocritical statement because it promotes the lie that we can thrive on garbage without being dirtied by it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
No reproach is like that we clothe in a smile, and present with a bow.
Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
Age | Enough | Family | Father | Isolation | Mother | Nature | People | Security | Wisdom | World |
There is nothing can equal the tender hours when life is first in bloom, when the heart like a bee, in a wild of flowers, finds everywhere perfume; when the present is all and it questions not if those flowers shall pass away, but pleased with its own delightful lot, dreams never of decay.
The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.
Cause | Example | Mother | Truth | Wisdom | Witness | Instruction |
Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.
Civilization | Past | Present | Wisdom |