This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The way to overcome the fear and unreality of death and the hereafter is to learn to live with eternal and invisible things here and now. If we live only for the pleasures of sense, of course we cannot take our satisfactions with us. But if we live for the things of the spirit, truth, goodness, love and their like, we shall be fitted for the life which survives the grave.
Death | Eternal | Fear | Grave | Life | Life | Love | Sense | Spirit | Truth | Learn |
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say 'Why not?'
Men |
The soul that flows out into God does not die; death is alien to what is submerged in life. The soul is alive, but not to itself. Stars are ever giving light, but they do not shine in the daytime; the sun shines in them, and they are hidden away in the sun’s rays. So it is with the soul; still alive, but now its life is bound up with God; or rather, it is God who lives in it.
Death is a cessation of motion, also a cessation of time - than it has to do with life, its most complex embodiment. Thinking that time brings death is a less workable assumption than a moral evasion, an example of our chronic tendency to ascribe our woes and weaknesses to external circumstance rather than to living will.
Death | Evasion | Example | Life | Life | Thinking | Time | Will | Circumstance |
The only thing we really have is nowness, is now. Sometimes when I teach these things, a person will come up to me afterward and say: “All this seems obvious! I’ve always known it. Tell me something new.” I say to him or her: “Have you actually understood, and realized, the truth of impermanence? Have you so integrated it with your every thought, breath, and movement that your life has been transformed? Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment that I am dying, and everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence become so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the pursuit of enlightenment? If you can answer ‘yes’ to both of these, then you have really understood impermanence.”
Death | Life | Life | Teach | Truth | Understanding | Will |
What is our life but this dance of transient forms? Isn’t everything always changing: the leaves on the trees in the park, the light in your room as you read this, the seasons, the weather, the time of day, the people passing you in the street? And what about us? Doesn’t everything we have done in the past seem like a dream now? The friends we grew up with, the childhood haunts, those views and opinions we once held with such single-minded passion: We have left them all behind.
Childhood | Life | Life | Light | Past | People | Time | Friends |
Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
It is no less vain to wish death than it is cowardly to fear it.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it reserves it by giving it the abolute dimension – “As unto himself eternity changes him at last.” Death does away with time.
Age | Death | Destiny | Eternity | Giving | Life | Life | Old age | Time | Old |
Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
Borrowing is the canker and death of every man's estate.
T. E. Lawrence, fully Thomas Edward Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia
All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds awake to find that it was vanity; But dreamers of day are dangerous men, that they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible.
A dream which is left uninterpreted is like a letter which is not read.