This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Douglas L. Edmonds, fully Douglas Lyman Edmonds
How many of us are waiting for the opportunity to do some great thing for the betterment of our community, forgetting that the solution of the problem requires only the active intelligent fulfillment of individual civic duty. The only things which are wrong about our Government are the things which are wrong with you and me. Democracy is never a thing done; it is and always will be a goal to be achieved. It means action, not passive acquiescence in things as they are; it requires alertness to duty, a dynamic faith, a willingness to give for the good of all. It can live only as a result of loyalty and devotion to its principles expressed by daily needs.
Action | Character | Democracy | Devotion | Duty | Dynamic | Faith | Fulfillment | Good | Government | Individual | Loyalty | Loyalty | Means | Opportunity | Principles | Waiting | Will | Wrong | Government |
A person’s soul has a spark of divinity. Forgetting one’s lofty identity, one might pick up major faults and bad habits. Therefore remember at all times that you are a child of the great King and it is not befitting to act in a lowly and degrading manner.
In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering... A great many people think they are thinking when they are rearranging their prejudices... the difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of cause.
Cause | Character | Choice | Good | Important | Man | People | Thinking | Think |
Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body: even as things are, addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and clearing away, memory will often revive. The soul is stability; the shifting and fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only of its forgetting not of its remembering - Lethe stream may be understood in this sense - and memory is a fact of the soul.
Body | Cause | Character | Forgetfulness | Memory | Sense | Soul | Will |
Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
We live between two dense clouds the forgetting of what was and the uncertainty of what will be.
Uncertainty | Will | Wisdom |
Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
Love is so short, and forgetting so long.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.
A Hopi tradition speaks of a fall from grace in which human beings experience themselves as progressively more separate from earth, animals, and other humans. The return to grace is through reunion. The cause of the fall is ascribed to people's forgetting their true nature and purpose.
Cause | Earth | Experience | Grace | Nature | People | Purpose | Purpose | Tradition |
There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.
Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
A man that depends on the riches and honors of this world, forgetting God and the welfare of his soul, is like a little child that holds a fair apple in the hand, of agreeable exterior, promising goodness, but that within its rotten and full of worms.
God | Little | Man | Riches | Soul | World | Riches | God | Child |
When the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten; when the belt fits, the belly is forgotten; when the heart is right, “for” and “against” are forgotten. There is no change in what is inside, no following what is outside, when the adjustment to events is comfortable. One begins with what is comfortable and never experiences what is uncomfortable, when one knows the comfort of forgetting what is comfortable.
Learn from your mistakes, but don't cry over them. We best redeem the past by forgetting it.
Past |
Life without absorbing occupation is hell - joy consists in forgetting life.
Hell | Joy | Life | Life | Occupation |
Jack Dempsey, fully William Harrison "Jack" Dempsey, "The Manassa Mauler"
By forgetting the past and by throwing myself into other interests, I forget to worry.
Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Art | Originality | Art |