This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To approach the living question with the mind alone is impossible. The intellect must be coupled with feeling in order to stir a person to authentic inquiry. Real philosophy recognizes that ideas have sensations and emotions connected with them, and that one responds to them with the whole of oneself.
Emotions | Ideas | Inquiry | Mind | Order | Philosophy | Question | Intellect |
Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. If Absence be not Death, neither is it theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as Friends do the Seas; they live in one another still.
I question whether God himself would wish me to hide behind the principles of non-violence while innocent people were being slaughtered.
God | People | Principles | Question | God |
Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
Death | Evil | Mankind | Providence |
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
For the water animals, the ocean is like a garden; for the land animals, it is death and pain.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The world is a playground, and death is the night.
Felix Rohatyn, fully Felix George Rohatyn
Money is the standard now. It’s the new religion. We have two religions in this country, fundamentalism and money, and I don’t know which is worse. I don’t see the death of greed. I see people worried that they may have come along a couple of years too late.
Have you ever considered how dreadful it would be if our lives had no appointed end but went on forever? Can you imagine that as far as the eye can see into the future we should remain enmeshed in all the desires and troubles of this life and that all the ensuing envy, hatred and malice, our own and other people’s should continue to pile up undiminished? If you have ever considered how intolerable the burden of our life would be without the understood certainty that it has an appointed end, you know that death comes to all, even the most fortunate, not as an enemy but as a deliverance.
Death | Enemy | Envy | Future | Life | Life | Malice | People | Troubles |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
What I wish to emphasize is the duality of the human requirement when it comes to the question of size: there is no single answer. For his different purposes man needs different structures, both small ones and large ones, some exclusive and some comprehensive… For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance. Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness – where this applies. (If there were a prevailing idolatry of smallness, irrespective of subject or purpose, one would have to try and exercise influence in the opposite direction.)
Balance | Duality | Influence | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Size | Work |
The glories of our blood and state are shadows, not substantial things; there is no armor against fate; death lays his icy hand on kings, sceptre and crown must tumble down, and in the dust be equal made with the poor crooked scythe and spade.
The most important and the concluding stage in the life of a man is death. It does not mean passing away and extinction of life, but returning home to the divine world and being taken up again into the social and divine unity of mythical primeval time. Death is a passage into a new existence, the transition to a new and true life. It is thus an event of the same kind as birth, initiation, and marriage, and it is not only the most important of all of these stages of life, but receives the fullest and the most detailed ceremonial expression: all the other stages reach their culmination and final conclusion in this.
Birth | Death | Existence | Important | Life | Life | Man | Marriage | Time | Unity | World |
Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
If death is one mystery, life is another, greater one… We can only fee awe before a mystery that both is what we are and surpasses our understanding.