This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing the microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of a past that attracts us because of its remoteness.
Past | Preference | Simplicity | Following |
Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
The secret cruelties that parents visit upon their children are past belief.
Jules de Goncourt, fully Jules Huot de Goncourt
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.
Future | Man | Nothing | Past | Present | Worship | Happiness |
In every soul to be saved is a godly will that has never consented to sin, in the past or in the future. Just as there is an animal will in our lower nature that oes not will what is good, so there is a godly will in our higher part, which by its basic goodness never wills what is evil, but only what is good.
I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.
Fear | Future | Melancholy | Nothing | Past |
Katherine Anne Porter, born Callie Russell Porter
The whole effort for the past one hundred years has been to remove the moral responsibility from the individual and make him blame his own human wickedness on his society, but he helps to make his society, you see, and he will not take his responsibility for his part in it.
Blame | Effort | Individual | Past | Responsibility | Wickedness | Will |
Katherine Anne Porter, born Callie Russell Porter
The past is never where you think you left it.
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
When we enter a new situation in life and are confronted by a new person, we bring with us the prejudices of the past and our previous experiences of people. These prejudices we project upon the new person. Indeed, getting to know a person is largely a matter of withdrawing projections; of dispelling the smoke screen of what we imagine he is like and replacing it with the reality of what he is actually like.
If the universe is a non-spatial computer, a ‘time machine' is a program that allows a user to have the same (ontologically non-spatial) feelings or experiences that occurred or s/he merely feels to have occurred in the past, with an in-built function to have different feelings or experiences than those of the past, and thus creating a possibility to change the past or to rewrite history in a pseudo sense.
I have everything I need to enjoy my here and now -- unless I am letting my consciousness be dominated by demands and expectations based on the dead past or the imagined future.
Consciousness | Need | Past |
Learned Hand, fully Billings Learned Hand
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
Past |
Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman
Malaise is a consequence of the depersonalization and permanent insecurity of modern life. Yet it has never been felt among people so strongly as in the past few decades. The inchoate protest, the sense of disenchantment, and the vague complaints and forebodings that are already perceptible in late nineteenth century art and literature have been diffused into general consciousness. There they function as a kind of vulgarized romanticism, a Weltschmerz in perpetuum, a sickly sense of disturbance that is subterranean but explosive. The intermittent and unexpected acts of violence on the part of the individual and the similar acts of violence to which whole nations can be brought are indices of this underground torment. Vaguely sensing that something has gone astray in modern life but also strongly convinced that he lacks the power to right whatever is wrong (even if it were possible to discover what is wrong), the individual lives in a sort of eternal adolescent uneasiness.
Art | Eternal | Individual | Insecurity | Life | Life | Literature | Nations | Past | People | Power | Right | Sense | Wrong | Art |
Have you noticed in your past experience that your kind interpretations were almost always truer than you harsh one?
Experience | Past |
Lin-chi, also Lin-chi Yi-sen, Lin-chi I-hsuan, Rinzai, Rinzai Gigen, Linji, Línjì Yìxuán NULL
Friends, I tell you this: there is no Buddha, no spiritual path to follow, no training and no realization. What are you so feverishly running after? Putting a head on top of your own head, you blind idiots? Your head is right where it should be. The trouble lies in your not believing in yourselves enough. Because you don't believe in yourselves you are knocked here and there by all the conditions in which you find yourselves. Being enslaved and turned around by objective situations, you have no freedom whatever, you are not masters of yourselves. Stop turning to the outside and don't be attached to my words either. Just cease clinging to the past and hankering after the future. This will be better than ten years' pilgrimage.
Better | Freedom | Past | Right | Training | Will | Words | Trouble |