This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Memory itself is an internal rumor; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe." - George Santayana
"A bad memory is the mother of invention." - Gerald Brenan, fully Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan
"I do not know at first what it is that charms me. The men and things of today are wont to be fairer and truer in tomorrow’s memory." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Literature is the memory of humanity." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"The test of pleasure is the memory it leaves behind." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise." - John Henry Newman
"If the will, which is the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness, a horrid thought!" - John Milton
"The brevity of our life, the dullness of our senses, the torpor of our indifference, the futility of our occupation, suffer us to know but little: and that little is soon shaken and then torn from the mind by the traitor to learning, that hostile and faithless stepmother to memory, oblivion." - John of Salisbury NULL
"The serene decision of the tombs is beautiful, their uncompromising architecture and the little squares with the coolness of a patio and the isolation and eternal individuation; each contemplated his own death, unique and personal like a memory. The quietude pleases us, we confuse such peace in life with dying and while we believe we desire not to be , we are praying for a peaceful life." - Jorge Luis Borges
"A positive emotional state entrains, or unites, our systems for thought, feeling, and action; shifts our concentration and energy toward support of our intellectual and creative forebrain (old mammalian and neocortex); and allows us to both learn and remember easily. In very young children, the primary caregiver’s emotional state determines the child’s state, and therefore the child’s development in general. Any kind of negative response, any form of fear or anger shifts our attention and energy from verbal-intellectual brain to our oldest survival brain. This shift shortchanges our intellect, cripples our learning and memory, and can lock our neocortex into service of our lower brain." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"All hormonal function, including that of the immune system and even allergic responses, occur as a sophisticated memory system handled primarily by our emotional brain. Because learning and memory are emotional-cognitive functions, the neural pattern, imprint, or “structure of knowledge” (to use Piaget’s term) of specific learning events includes in its content the memory patterns of those emotional hormones prominent in the body at the time of that learning." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream." - Kahlil Gibran
"A liar better have a good memory." - Latin Proverbs
"Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
"My parents never bound us to any church but taught us that the love of goodness was the love of God, the cheerful doing of duty made life happy, and that the love of one’s neighbor in its widest sense was the best help for oneself. Their lives showed us how lovely this simple faith was, how much honor, gratitude and affection it brought them, and what a sweet memory they left behind." - Louisa May Alcott
"Habit is memory in action." - Madame La Comtesse, Diane de Vobrillac (Marie de Beausacq)
"Memory is the treasury of all things and their guardian." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The life given us by nature is short, but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much: Who has gained the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children: Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task: Who has left the world better than he has found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul: Who has never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it: Who has looked for the best in others and given the best he had: Whose life was an inspiration: whose memory is a benediction." - Bessie Anderson Stanley, fully Elizabeth-Anne "Bessie" Anderson Stanley
"Every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive." - Plato NULL
"His heart was as great as the world but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion; all his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation occasions for the introduction of what he has to say. The favorites of society are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fills the hour and the company, contented and contending." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"For all the psychological and physiological conditions which test integrity - fear, desire, hunger, fatigue, disaffection, anger, pain - have little reality in memory or anticipation but rather exist for the most part in the narrow immediacy of the present." - Robert Grudin
"The person of integrity is a continuous person, for whom the present is a point on a line drawn out of memory and into the willed future, rather than an unpredicted and unwieldy configuration which seems to operate under its own law. The person of integrity is no superman; he will be, from time to time, defeated, frustrated, embarrassed and completely surprised. but neither is he the common and regular dupe of circumstance, compelled (like some tourist with a pocket dictionary) to consult conscience and emotion at each new turn of events." - Robert Grudin
"Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and the council chamber of thought." - Saint Basil, aka Basil of Caesarea, Saint Basil the Great NULL
"Love harmonizes the three powers of our soul, and binds them together. The will, with ineffable love, follows what the eye of the understanding has beheld; and, with its strong hand, it stores up in the memory the treasure that id draws from this love." - Saint Catherine of Siena NULL
"What thou givest after thy death, remember that thou givest it to a stranger, and most times to an enemy; for he that shall marry thy wife will despise thee, thy memory and thine, and shall possess the quiet of thy labors, the fruit which thou hast planted, enjoy thy love, and spend with joy and ease what thou hast spared and gotten with care and travail." - Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now history has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, guides us by vanities. Think now she gives when our attention is distracted and what she gives, gives with such supple confusions that the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late what’s not believed in, or if still believed, in memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with till the refusal propagates a fear. Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. " - 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." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"How a thing grows in the human memory, in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it." - Thomas Carlyle
"What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it." - Thomas Carlyle
"A great scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones, into the unity of breathing life." - Thomas De Quincey, fully Thomas Penson De Quincey
"Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing." - Thomas Fuller
"Soul is not about function, it is about beauty and form and memory.... For the soul, then, beauty is not defined as pleasantness of form but rather as the quality of things that invites absorption and contemplation." - Thomas Moore
"It must be a peace without victory... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Man is like an island, a circle within circles. Man is separated from these outer circles by his mind, his beliefs, and the limitations put upon him by a life away from the Earth. The circle of man, the island of self, is the place of logic, the ‘I,’ the ego, and the physical self. That is the island that man has chosen to live within today, and in doing so he has created a prison for himself. The walls of the island prison are thick, made up of doubts, logic and lack of belief. His isolation from his greater circles of self is suffocating and prevents him from seeing life clearly and purely. It is a world of ignorance where the flesh is the only reality, the only god... Beyond man’s island of ego, his prison, lies the world of the spirit-that-moves-in-all-things, the force that is found in all things. It is a world that communicates to all entities of Creation and touches the creator. It is a circle of life that houses all man’s instinct, his deepest memory, his power to control his body and mind, and a bridge that helps man transcend flesh. It is a world that expands man’s universe and helps him to fuse himself to the earth. Most of all, it is a world that brings man to his higher self and to spiritual rapture." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"Tomorrow’s memory depends upon today’s impressions... Your memory builds your personality, your personality builds your character, and your character determines your destiny." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Though God is everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul. the natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of his habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth of thee from whence all these faculties come forth, as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of the tree. This depth is the unity, the eternity - I had almost said the infinity - of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it rest but the infinity of God." - William Law
"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory." - Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
"I have a room where into no one enters save I myself alone. There sits a blessed memory on a throne; there my life centres." - Christina Georgina Rossetti
"Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be. " - David Halberstam
"His eloquent tongue so well seconds his fertile invention that no one speaks better when suddenly called forth. His attention never languishes; his mind is always before his words; his memory has all its stock so turned into ready money that, without hesitation or delay, it supplies whatever the occasion may require." - Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam