This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"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." - Tyron Edwards
"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?" - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"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." - Elizabeth I NULL
"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." -
"Sweet is the memory of past labor." - Euripedes NULL
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it." - William Feather
"Truth comes home to the mind so naturally that when we learn it for the first time, it seems as though we did no more than recall it to our memory." - Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, also called Bernard de Bouyer
"A song will outlive all sermons in the memory." - Henry Giles
"What we do for ours while we have them, will be precisely what will render their memory sweet to the heart when we no longer have them." - Frédéric Louis Godet
"I have ever gained the most profit, and the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise in my affections." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
"The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas." - David Hume
"The only connexion or relation of objects, which can lead us beyond the immediate impression of our memory and senses, is that of cause and effect; and that because ‘tis the only one, on which we can found a just inference from one object to another." - David Hume
"Every man's memory is his private literature." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth, and delights old age." - Lactantius, fully Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius NULL
"Music moves us, and we know not why; we feel the tears but cannot trace their source. Is the language of some other state, born of its memory? For what can wake the soul's strong instinct of another world like music?" - Letitia Elizabeth Landon
"True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment." - James Russell Lowell
"When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough." - Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
"Waste not your strength trying to push shut doors which God is opening. Neither wear yourself out in keeping open doors which ought to be forever sealed. Some episode in your life, over which you are anxious, is closed. it is in the past. Whatever its memory, you cannot change it. But you can shut the door. Go into some silent place of thought. Test your self-respect. Ask your soul, "Have I emerged from this experience with honor, or if not, can honor be retrieved?" And if your soul answers, "Yes," close then the door to that Past; hang a garland over the portal if you will, but come away without tarrying. The east is aflame with the radiance of the morning, and before you stands many another door, held open by the hand of God." - Oscar Edward Maurer
"Memory is what makes us young or old." - Alfred de Musset, fully Alfred Louis Charles de Musset
"Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food." - Austin O'Malley
"Not all who perceive with eyes the sensible products of art are affected alike by the same object, but if they know it for the outward portrayal of an archetype subsisting in intuition, their hearts are shaken and they recapture memory of that Original." - Plotinus NULL
"Memory is not so brilliant as hope, but it is more beautiful, and a thousand times more true." - George Dennison Prentice
"If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of seeing; of a whispering gallery that had the power of haring; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched - such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages; yet it is the same absurdity to think that the impressions of external objects upon the machine of our bodies can be the real efficient cause of thought and perception." - Paul Reichmann
"If you are possessed by so great a craving for life, reflect that the things which vanish from our gaze... are not annihilated: they merely end their course and do not perish. And death, which we far and shrink from, merely interrupts life but does not take it away. The day will return when we shall be restored to the light. Many would object to this, but they are returned without memory. I mean to show you later that everything which seems to perish merely changes. Since you are destined to return, depart with a tranquil mind." -
"Those things on which philosophy has set its seal are beyond the reach of injury; no age will discard them or lessen their force, each succeeding century will add somewhat to the respect in which they are held; for we look upon what is near us with jealous eyes, but we admire what is further off with less prejudice. The wise man’s life, therefore, includes much; he is not hedged in by the same limits which confine others; he alone is exempt from the laws by which mankind is governed; all ages serve him like a god. If any time be past he recalls it by his memory, if it be present he uses it, if it be future he anticipates it; his life is a long one because he concentrates all times into it." -
"There must be some supreme, universal design. Each of us comes to life and stays in the world for predestined period. Some leave forever, sometimes without a trace; others stay for a long time, both in life and in memory. We remain longest - we make a difference - when we manage to act not for ourselves but for others. It is possible to create good and evil. The greatest and most important thing a person can do is to understand that where good exists, evil also resides; what’s more, one must strive to stay on the side of righteousness, doing one’s best to promote good in the world. Only you can make this choice. You alone will be held responsible - by other people, by your progeny and by history." - Eduard Shevardnadze
"The chief aid to memory is order." - Simonides, aka Simonedes of Ceos NULL
"A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor." - Alexander Smith
"The excitement of tomorrow's science will be in the discovery of the amino acids' memory storage capacities." - Tauri NULL
"If reality flows like a stream, then knowledge of such reality also becomes fluid, a process rather than a set of fixed truths. And because all knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated and applied in thought; then thought too must be seen as part of the same eternal tide... Thought is, in essence, a response of memory. It consists of a repetition of some image or sensation, or it involves a combination or reorganisation of such repetition in a new and useful way. So, in the end, intelligence turns out to be part of the flow. It is not grounded in cells or molecules, but drawn from the same moving stream as reality. In other words, mind and matter are ultimately inseparable." - Lyall Watson
"Curiosity is as much the parent of attention as attention is of memory; therefore the first business of a teacher - first not only in point of time, but of importance - should be to excite not merely a general curiosity on the subject of the study, but a particular curiosity on particular points in that subject. To teach one who has no curiosity to learn is to sow a field without ploughing it." - Richard Whately
"In memory everything seems to happen to music." - Tennessee Williams, fully Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams
"Nothing comes harder than original thought. Even the most gifted scientist spends only a tiny fraction of his waking hours doing it, probably less than one tenth of one percent. the rest of the time his mind hugs the coast of the known, reworking old information, adding lesser data, giving reluctant attention to the ideas of others (what use can I make of them?), warming lazily to the memory of successful experiments, and looking for a problem - always looking for a problem, something that can be accomplished, that will lead somewhere, anywhere." - E. O. Wilson, fully Edward Osborne "E.O." Wilson
"There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted." - James Branch Cabell
"Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on a star." - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
"Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end." - Madame de Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, born Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Madame Necker
"Memory is intimately linked to identity. Who I am is importantly constituted by both the content of my memories and by the manner in which I remember things – by how I fit them into the narrative of my life and by the spin I put on the events I remember." - Owen Flanagan
"Religious faith must link us to communities of shared memory and shared hope with which we can join in symbolizing our human condition and in enacting the visions that can animate give new life. Religious faith cannot be reduced to the ethical or to the merely utilitarian. But, as part of this larger and indispensable contribution that religious faith can provide to making and keeping life human, it needs also to be held accountable for the renewal and extension of a universal covenant with being. It needs to be held accountable for its broader contribution to good faith on earth." - James W. Fowler III
"You can only live in the present… only act in the present… only experience in the present. What you call the future, things that you may be planning, or things that you may be dreading – all this is still but a present state of mind. This is the real meaning of the traditional phrase, The Eternal Now. The only joy you can experience is the joy you experience now. A happy memory is a present joy. The only pain you can experience is the pain of the present moment. Sad memories are present pain." - Emmet Fox
"[In memory of Dad] Do not stand by my grave and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep – I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sunlight on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain. Do not stand by my grave an cry. I am not there. I did not die." - G. W. F. NULL
"Despite many assertions to the contrary, the brain is not “like a computer.” Yes, the brain has many electrical connections, just like a computer. But at each point in a computer only a binary decision can be made – yes or no, on or off, zero or one. Each point in the brain, each brain cell, contains all the genetic information necessary to reproduce the entire organism. Brain cell is not a switch. It has a memory; it can be subtle. Each brain cell is like a computer. The brain is like a hundred billion computers all connected together. It is impossible to understand because it is so complex." -