This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Men fear death, as children fear the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by frightful tales, so is the other. Groans, convulsions, weeping friends, and the like show death terrible; yet there is no passion so weak but conquers the fear of it, and therefore death is not such a terrible enemy. Revenge triumphs over death, loves slights its, honor aspires to it, dread of shame prefers it, grief flies to it, and fear anticipates it.
Children | Death | Dread | Enemy | Fear | Grief | Honor | Men | Passion | Revenge | Shame |
Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation for the night is to work diligently while the day lasts. The best preparation for death is life.
Day | Death | Expectation | Life | Life | Work | Expectation |
George Moore, fully George Augustus Moore
Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?
George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
The sole means now for the savings of the beings on the planet Earth would be to implant into their presences a new organ with such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them that has swallowed up the whole of their Essence and also the tendency to hate others which flows from it - the tendency, namely, which engenders all those mutual relationships existing there, which serve as the chief cause of all their abnormalities unbecoming to three-brained beings and maleficent for them themselves and for the whole Universe.
Attention | Cause | Death | Destroy | Earth | Existence | Hate | Means | Sense | Universe |
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
Men |
With the approach of death I care less and less about religion and truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation and darkness.
Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.
Better | Birth | Children | Conquest | Death | Loneliness | Marriage | Men | Sacrifice | Terror | Waiting | War | Understand |
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Love makes us poets and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but is use is to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to dance is not rendered ironical because the danced cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so. what is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.
Cause | Death | Enough | Illusion | Impulse | Life | Life | Nature | Object | People | Pleasure | Sound | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
Human life, because it is marked by a beginning and an end, becomes whole, an entirety in itself that can be subjected to judgment only when it has ended in death. Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world; he is a highly suggestible mind hypnotized by reality.
There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear; and there is damnation in the things that wicked men love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what winds are to oceans and malarial regions, which waft away the elements of disease, and bring new elements of health. And where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.
Death | Disease | Free speech | Health | Love | Men | People | Speech |