This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Louis L'Amour, fully Louis Dearborn L'Amour
No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
Memory |
Luis Buñuel, fully Luis Buñuel Portolés
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.
Intelligence | Life | Life | Memory |
No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name, tomorrow. If the name is the thing; if a name in us is the concept of every thing placed outside of us; and without a name you don’t have the concept, and the thing remains in us as if blind, indistinct and undefined: well then, let each carve this name that I bore among men, a funeral epigraph, on the brow of that image in which I appeared to him, and then leave it in peace, and let there be no more talk about it. It is fitting for the dead. For those who have concluded. I am alive and I do not conclude. Life does not conclude. And life knows nothing of names. This tree, tremulous pulse of new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, wandering.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.
Memory |
Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.
Mary Pipher, aka Mary Elizabeth Pipher or Mary Bray Pipher
I read of a Buddhist teacher who developed Alzheimer's. He had retired from teaching because his memory was unreliable, but he made one exception for a reunion of his former students. When he walked onto the stage, he forgot everything, even where he was and why. However, he was a skilled Buddhist and he simply began sharing his feelings with the crowd. He said, "I am anxious. I feel stupid. I feel scared and dumb. I am worried that I am wasting everyone's time. I am fearful. I am embarrassing myself." After a few minutes of this, he remembered his talk and proceeded without apology. The students were deeply moved, not only by his wise teachings, but also by how he handled his failings.
Living in the present moment requires discretion toward memory. Without memory we’d have amnesia. What good would there be in that? Offer discretion and discernment for our past with a broad spectrum of forgiveness. As for our present moment, delight. And dedication to remain fully present to all the possibility
Dedication | Discernment | Discretion | Good | Memory | Past | Present |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.
Memory |
Michael Dorris, fully Michael Anthony Dorris
Fear is a memory of better times. Fear is a dream.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Anyone who does not feel sufficiently strong in memory should not meddle with lying.
Memory |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
The memory represents to us not what we choose, but what it pleases.
Memory |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.
Change | Evidence | Failure | Meaning | Memory | Order | Progress | Failure | Child |
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
Love lost is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. Life has to end. Love doesn’t.