This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Like a child falling asleep over his toys, man loosens his grasp on earthly possessions only when death overtakes him.
Death | Man | Possessions | Wisdom | Child |
The bed of death brings every human being to his pure individuality, to the intense contemplation of that deepest and most solemn of all relations - the relation between the creature and his Creator.
Contemplation | Death | Individuality | Wisdom | Contemplation |
Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss
Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature. Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race.
Death | Human race | Indifference | Nature | Race | Wisdom |
There seems to be direct link between truly creative intelligence and the ability to dilute consciousness, to cut mental corners and practice unusual, lateral thinking in what amounts almost to a state of trance. All the most profound insights seem to flow from breaches in the barrier between waking thought, which tends to be conservative, and dream logic, which is essential liberal.
Ability | Consciousness | Intelligence | Logic | Practice | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom |
Money is a dream. It is a piece of paper on which is imprinted in invisible ink the dream of all the things it will buy, all the trinkets and all the power over others. A kind of institutionalized dream, along with its companion dream-in-stitution of Success, constitutes the main fantasy on which our way of life has been built.
The meaning of death is not the annihilation of the spirit, but its separation from the body, and that the resurrection and day of assembly do not mean a return to a new existence after annihilation, but the bestowal of a new form or frame to the spirit.
One who longs for death is miserable, but more miserable is he who fears it.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
What indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?
Every unkindness to another is a little Death in the Divine Image; nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood.
Brotherhood | Death | Little | Man | Unkindness |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
Bitterness | Change | Daring | Future | Man | Surrender | Will | World | Loss | Privilege |