This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
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 |
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.
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.
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.
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream - it may be so the moment after death.
Death |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Death is not the end: it is temporary emancipation... the land to which souls go at death - they enjoy a freedom such as they never knew during their earthly life. So don’t pity the person who is passing through the delusion of death, for in a little while he will be free. Once he gets out of that delusion, he sees that death was not so bad after all. He realizes that his mortality was only a dream and rejoices that now no fire can burn him, no water can drown him; he is free and safe.
Death | Delusion | Freedom | Land | Life | Life | Little | Pity | Safe | Will |
Dreams are rudiments of the great state to come. We dream what is about to happen.
Dreams |
We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream is man, no more.
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 |
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 |
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.
Art teaches us to respect imagination as something far beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul... Leonardo da Vinci asks an interesting question in one of his notebooks: "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" One answer is that the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could, with some effort of imagination, glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events. Dream teaches us to look with that other eye, the eye that in waking life belongs to the artist, to each of us as artist... Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity.
Art | Control | Dreams | Effort | Eternal | Eternity | Events | Heart | Illusion | Imagination | Important | Intention | Life | Life | Question | Rationality | Respect | Sensibility | Soul | Surrender | Time | Respect | Art |