This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure - fearlessness and achievement.
Achievement | Adventure | Conquest | Courage | Death | Experience | Fear | Joy | Life | Life |
O Friend, hope for Him whilst you live, know whilst you live, understand whilst you live; for in life deliverance abides. If your bonds be not broken whilst living, what hope of deliverance in death? It is but an empty dream that the soul shall have union with Him because it has passed form the body; if He is found now, He is found then; if not, we do not but go to dwell in the City of Death.
Body | Death | Friend | Hope | Life | Life | Soul | Understand |
The soul is an embryo in the body of man, and the day of death is the day of awakening, for it is the great era of labour and the rich hour of creation... Death is an ending to the son of the earth, but to the soul it is the start, the triumph of life... Death removes but the touch, and not the awareness of all good. And he who has lived one spring or more possesses the spiritual life of one who has lived a score of springs.
Awakening | Awareness | Body | Day | Death | Earth | Era | Good | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Awareness |
Watching television, you’d think we lived at bay, in total jeopardy, surrounded on all sides by human-seeking germs, shielded against infection and death only by a chemical technology that enables us to keep killing them off.
Death | Technology | Television | Think |
Learning is the only wealth tyrants cannot despoil. Only death can dim the lamp of knowledge that is within you. The true wealth of a nation lies not in its gold or silver but in its learning, wisdom, and in the uprightness of its sons.
When vitality runs high, death takes men by surprise. But if they close their eyes to this possibility, what they gain in peace they lose in sensibility and significance.
Death | Men | Peace | Sensibility |
The death of the advertising agency and the propaganda bureau will be one of the surest signs of the birth of a new society.
Advertising | Birth | Death | Society | Will | Propaganda |
How ignorant are those who see, without question, the abstract existence of some of their senses, but insist upon doubting until that existence reveals itself to all their senses. Is not faith the sense of the heart as truly as sight is the sense of the eye?... How strange is the one who dreams in truth of a beautiful reality, and then, when he endeavours to fashion it into form but cannot succeed, doubts the dream and blasphemes the reality and distrusts the beauty!
Abstract | Beauty | Dreams | Existence | Faith | Heart | Question | Reality | Sense | Truth |
Mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime - birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death - in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time. For all the symbolic narratives, images, rites, and festivals by which life within the cultural monad is controlled and defined are of the order of the way of art. Their effect, therefore, is to wake the intellect to realizations equivalent to those of the insights that produced them.
Adolescence | Age | Art | Birth | Childhood | Control | Death | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Old age | Order | Rites | System | Time | World | Intellect | Old |
The Reality of Life is Life itself, whose beginning is not in the womb, and whose ending is not in the grave. For the years that pass are naught but a moment in eternal life; and the world of matter and all in it is but a dream compared to the awakening which we call the terror of Death.
Awakening | Beginning | Death | Eternal | Grave | Life | Life | Reality | Terror | World |
Madame La Comtesse, Diane de Vobrillac (Marie de Beausacq)
I prefer a dream to an illusion. In a dream I know my eyes are closed; in an illusion I think they are open.
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
It is the “where I am” that makes heaven. The life after death might become through its very endlessness a burden to our spirits, if it were not to be filled wit the infinite variety and freshness of God’s love. Some have shrunk from its very infinitude, because they have not realized what God’s love can make of it. Human love helps us to understand this. When we have come to love any one with all our power of affection, then there is no monotony or weariness in the days and hours we spend with them.
Death | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Love | Power | Wit | Understand |
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Death is a great preacher of deathlessness. The protest of the soul against death, its reversion, its revulsion, is a high instinct of life. Dissatisfaction in his world who satisfieth the desire of every living thing has a grip on the future. As far as this goes, he has the least assurance of immortality who can be best satisfied with eating and drinking and “things”’ he has the surest hope of ongoings and far distances who does not live by brad alone, whose eye is looking over the shoulder of things, whose ear hears mighty waters rolling ever more, who has “hopes naught can satisfy below.” The limits of which death makes us aware, make us aware of life’s limitlessness. The wing cage knows it was meant for an ampler ether and diviner air.
Death | Desire | Future | Hope | Immortality | Instinct | Life | Life | Protest | Soul | World |
We do not make use of our freedom. We have given away the fundamental freedom to visualize and shape our world. We allow actors, advertisers and politicians to dream for us. And a culture that does not dream is not free.
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
Love is how you stay alive, even after you're gone ... Death ends a life, not a relationship.
We are but shadows: we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream - till the heart be touched. that touch creates us - then we begin to be - thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity.