This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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.
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 |
Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
The power to question is the basis of all human progress.
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
In many spiritual traditions there is only one important question to answer, and that question is: Who am I? When we begin to answer it, we are filled with images and ideals – the negative images of ourselves that we wish to change and perfect and the positive images of some great spiritual potential – yet the path is not so much about changing ourselves as it is about listening to the fundamentals of our being.
My question is, what can we hope to achieve with reason, when all the material and assistance of experience are taken away?
Experience | Hope | Question | Reason |
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign asters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. Systems which attempt to question it deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.
Darkness | Effort | Law | Light | Man | Mankind | Nature | Object | Pain | Pleasure | Question | Reality | Reason | Right | Sense | System | Will | Words | Wrong | Govern |
Death be not proud, though some have called Thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so... One short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.