This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If the memory is more flexible in childhood, it is more tenacious in mature age; if childhood has sometimes the memory of words, old age has that of things, which impress themselves according tot he clearness of the conception of the thought which we wish to retain.
Age | Childhood | Memory | Old age | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Old | Thought |
Bill Bradley, fully William Warren "Dollar Bill" Bradley
The winning team like the conquering army claims everything in its path and seems to say that only winning is important. Yet like getting into a college of your choice or winning an election or marrying a beautiful mate, victory is fraught with as much danger as glory. Victory has very narrow meanings and, if exaggerated or misused, can become a destructive force.
Choice | Danger | Force | Glory | Important | Wisdom | Danger | Winning |
Karl Bühler, fully Karl Ludwig Bühler
By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely.
Age | Body | Control | Education | Knowledge | Language | Memory | Time | Wisdom | Words | Work | Child |
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
He got the better of himself, and that's the best kind of victory one can wish for.
Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
It is the easiest thing in the world for us to obey God when He command us to do what we like, and to trust Him when the path is all sunshine. The real victory of faith is to trust God in the dark, and through the dark. Let us be assured of this, that if the lesson and the rod are of His appointing, and that His all-wise love has engineered the deep tunnel of trial on the heavenward road, He will never desert us during the discipline. The vital thing for us is not to deny and desert Him.
Discipline | Faith | God | Lesson | Love | Trust | Will | Wisdom | Wise | World | Trial | God |
Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Illusion | Loneliness | Memory | Terror | Wisdom |
One ought to have a good memory when he has told a lie.
The secret of a good memory is attention, and attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it. We rarely forget that which has made a deep impression on our minds.
Attention | Good | Impression | Memory | Wisdom |
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one ;unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy?
Courage | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Memory | Music | Past | Present | Resignation | Self | Sorrow | Soul | Sympathy | Tenderness | Weakness | Wisdom |
I pluck up the goodlisome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them at length in the high seat of memory by gathering them together; that so, having tasted their sweetness, I may the less perceive the bitterness of life.
It is not true that there are no enjoyments in the ways of sin; there are, many and various. But the great and radical defect of them all is, that they are transitory and insubstantial, at war with reason and conscience, and always leave a sting behind... They may and often do satisfy us for a moment; but it is death in the end. It is the bread of heaven and the water of life that can so satisfy that we shall hunger no more and thirst no more forever.
Conscience | Death | Heaven | Hunger | Life | Life | Reason | Sin | War | Wisdom |