This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Six, or at most seven, hour’s sleep is, for a constancy, as much as you or anybody else can want; more is only laziness and dozing, and is, I am persuaded, both unwholesome and stupefying.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
At death, you forget all the limitations of the physical body, and realize how free you are... You exist apart from the mortal body... There is nothing to fear. When death comes, laugh at it. Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die. Our real self, the soul, is immortal. We may sleep for a little while in that change called death, but we can never be destroyed. We exist, and that existence is eternal... Nothing can terminate the eternal consciousness.
Body | Change | Consciousness | Death | Eternal | Existence | Experience | Fear | Lesson | Little | Mortal | Nothing | Self | Soul | Learn |
Ah, snug lie those that slumber beneath conviction's roof. Their floors are sturdy lumber, their windows weatherproof. But I sleep cold forever, and cold sleep all my kind, for I was born to shiver in the draft from an open mind. Born nakedly to shiver in the draft of an open mind.
Mind |
The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
Enough | Greatness | Justice | Need | Perception | Plenty | Poverty | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |
Life itself is a bubble and skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep.
Life | Life | Skepticism |
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
Day |
Man should not be joyous amongst the weeping, nor should he weep amongst the joyous. He should not be awake amongst the sleeping, nor should he sleep amongst those who are awake.
Man |
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; no more; and, by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life; for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?
Calamity | Death | Delay | Dread | Dreams | Fortune | Law | Life | Life | Love | Man | Merit | Mind | Mortal | Office | Question | Respect | Time | Troubles | Will | Wrong | Respect | Calamity |
Kind sleep affords the only boon the wretched mind can feel; a momentary respite from despair.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
Nothing | Understand |
George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair
Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Men |
Harold Kushner, fully Harold Samuel Kushner
I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear... that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived.
Ida Tarbell, fully Ida Minerva Tarbell
How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.
Isak Dinesen, pen name of Baroness Karen Blixen
People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.
Day | Dreams | Freedom | Glory | Pleasure | Will | World | Happiness |
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
The goal is part of the desiring mind and bliss is a state of no-mind. Desiring is a barrier: non-desiring is the bridge. And all goals are egoistic because they are ambitions. Ambitions are shadows of the ego, and wherever ego is bliss is not. When the ego completely disappears, when not even a trace is left behind, bliss is found. Even to say that it is found is not exactly right, because it is our nature; we don't find it because we have never lost it in the first place. We have only become oblivious to it, we have become unconscious about it. We have gone into a deep sleep and we are dreaming all kinds of things. Because of our dreaming and sleep and unconsciousness, the bliss remains unexperienced. Otherwise it surrounds you.
Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre
Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.
For conscience, instead of allowing us to stifle our perceptions, and sleep on without interruption, acts as an inward witness and monitor, reminds us of what we owe to God, points out the distinction of good and evil, and thereby convicts us of departure from duty.
Distinction | Good | Witness |