This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Your past is hidden in your silence, now - in your speech, and the future - in your false steps.
We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
For the past fifty years at least, Western scholars have approached the study of myth from a viewpoint markedly different from, let us say, that of the nineteenth century. Unlike their predecessors, who treated myth in the usual meaning of the word, that is, as "fable," "invention," "fiction," they have accepted it as it was understood in archaic societies, where, on the contrary, "myth" means a "true story" and, beyond that, a story that is a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant. This new semantic value given the term "myth" makes its use in contemporary parlance somewhat equivocal. Today, that is, the word is employed both in the sense of "fiction" or "illusion" and in that familiar especially to ethnologists, sociologists, and historians of religions, the sense of "sacred tradition, primordial revelation, exemplary model." ... the Greeks steadily continued to empty mythos of all religious and metaphysical value. Contrasted both with logos and, later, with historia, mythos came in the end to denote "what cannot really exist." On its side, Judaeo-Christianity put the stamp of "falsehood" and "illusion" on whatever was not justified or validated by the two Testaments.
Meaning | Means | Myth | Past | Semantic | Sense | Story | Study | Value |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
All gods, past and present, have owed their existence to a human imagination unfired from the fetters of its primordial animality.
Existence | Imagination | Past |
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Better | Change | Destroy | Future | Insult | Past | People | Reason | Insult |
Milarepa, fully Jetsun Milarepa NULL
A free and resourceful and fully equipped human body that's freed of the eight unfree states is not easy to get. To get to the heart of this free and resourceful occasion and to get past the pleasures of life is not easy to do. To see what is wrong with the phenomenon of samsara and accomplish nirvana is not something easy to do. Although one might practice true dharma extensively the purest conductive conditions don't easily join. A lama who masters instructions and scriptures and logic and has a compassionate heart is not easy to find. A student with faith who does not get fed up or exhausted and is able to actually practice is not easy to find. A practice environment blessed with the proper conditions free of all hazard and fear is not easy to find. Friends with the same motivation and way to apply it who’s thinking accords with your own are not easy to find A body that's able to work with its pain and illness and to do all you bid it is not something easy to find. Although you might get every one of these factors together to practice with one-pointed mind is not easy to do. These are nine things which are difficult to come by. They're difficult, but it's these difficult things you must do.
Body | Faith | Fear | Hazard | Heart | Life | Life | Mind | Pain | Past | Practice | Thinking | Work | Wrong | Blessed |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
This explains why, since the birth of the State, the world of politics has always been and continues to be the stage for unlimited rascality and brigandage, brigandage and rascality which, by the way, are held in high esteem, since they are sanctified by patriotism, by the transcendent morality and the supreme interest of the State. This explains why the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present, of all times and all countries — statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors — if judged from the standpoint of simple morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to hard labour or to the gallows. There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: "for reasons of state.
Betrayal | Birth | History | Morality | Past | Politics | World |
Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.
Past | Philosophy |
Morris West, fully Morris Langlo West
History is always written by victors, and the defeated create a new set of myths to explain the past and gild the future.
Past |
When we contemplate the duration of the universe, we see it limited to the present moment, which is nothing more but the point which separates two infinities of time. The past and the future are as meaningless as if they did not exist. Is anyone more misguided than the man who barters an eternal future for a moment which passes quicker than the blink of an eye?
What is past is gone, what is hoped for is absent, for you is the hour in which you are.
Past |
At a single strain of music, the scent of a flower, or even one glimpse of a path of moonlight lying fair upon a Summer sea, the barriers crumble and fall. Through the long corridors the ghosts of the past walk unforbidden, hindered only by broken promises, dead hopes, and dream-dust.
What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world.
The Indians, whose theory of time, is not linear like ours – that is, not proceeding consecutively from past to present to future – have always been able to accept, seemingly without anxiety, the notion of an alternately expanding and contracting universe, an idea recently advanced by certain Western scientists. In Hindu cosmology, immutable Brahman, at fixed intervals, draws back into his beginningless, endless Being the whole substance of the living world. There then takes place the long “sleep” of Brahaman from which, in course of countless aeons, there is an awakening, and another universe or “dream” emerges.
Nachman of Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Bratslav, Nachman from Uman NULL
You need to greatly encourage yourself in His service as much as you can, even if you are the way you are, you should rely on His abundantly great mercy which is beyond limit, for certainly he will not forsake you, no matter how badly you’ve acted. The past doesn’t exist. The main thing is that from now on you honestly resolve not to do it again.
Perhaps the most obvious of our systemic problems is uncontrollable growth. I use the word “uncontrollable” advisedly, in preference to “uncontrolled.” The growth of which I speak is not humanity’s colonization of the planet over millennia of history. It is rather an inexorable material reality that is unique to our era: namely, that unlimited economic growth is assumed to be evidence of human progress. We have taken this notion so much for granted over the past few generations that it is as immutably fixed in our consciousness as the sanctity of property itself.
Consciousness | Evidence | Growth | Past | Preference | Problems | Property | Reality | Unique |
If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.
National Academy of Sciences NULL
Scientists use the term 'fact' to refer to a scientific explanation that has been tested and confirmed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing it or looking for additional examples. In that respect, the past and continuing occurrence of evolution is a scientific fact. Because the evidence supporting it is so strong, scientists no longer question whether biological evolution has occurred and is continuing to occur. Instead, they investigate the mechanisms of evolution, how rapidly evolution can take place, and related questions.
National Academy of Sciences NULL
The concept of biological evolution is one of the most important ideas ever generated by the application of scientific methods to the natural world. The evolution of all the organisms that live on Earth today from ancestors that lived in the past is at the core of genetics, biochemistry, neurobiology, physiology, ecology, and other biological disciplines. It helps to explain the emergence of new infectious diseases, the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, the agricultural relationships among wild and domestic plants and animals, the composition of Earth's atmosphere, the molecular machinery of the cell, the similarities between human beings and other primates, and countless other features of the biological and physical world. As the great geneticist and evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973, ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’
Earth | Evolution | Ideas | Important | Light | Past | Sense |