This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Whatever life is (and nobody can define it) it is something forever changing shape, fleeting, escaping us into death. Life is indeed the only thing that can die, and it begins to die as soon as it is born, and never ceases dying. Each of us is constantly experiencing cellular death. For the renewal of our tissues means a corresponding death of them, so that death and rebirth become, biologically, right and left hand of the same thing. All growing is at the same time a dying away from that which lived yesterday.
Bound only by birth and death, life is both the ultimate mystery and the process of solving it. Life is a dance, a leap into the unknown. After you jump and before you land, is God. God is ecstasy: that state of being when everything comes together, nothing is missing, and it’s all vibrating and electric. Life is an excuse for ecstasy.
Birth | Death | Ecstasy | God | Land | Life | Life | Mystery | Nothing | Wisdom | God |
Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
Ambition | Avarice | Birth | Curiosity | Falsehood | Flattery | Philosophy | Pride | Superstition | Wisdom |
The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.
Russell Schweikart, fully Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart aka Schweikart
[The earth] is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love.
Art | Birth | Death | Earth | History | Little | Love | Means | Music | Poetry | Universe | Wisdom | Art |
The real object of education is to give children resources that will endure as long as life endures; habits that time will ameliorate, not destroy; occupation that will render sickness tolerable, solitude pleasant, age venerable, life more dignified and useful, and death less terrible.
Age | Children | Death | Destroy | Education | Life | Life | Object | Occupation | Solitude | Time | Will | Wisdom |
Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL
Our purpose is to live in harmony with those cycles [birth, growth, death and regeneration] to develop our peculiar organs of consciousness and creativity to add to the beauty, love, humor, diversity and general interest of the world.
Beauty | Birth | Consciousness | Creativity | Death | Diversity | Growth | Harmony | Humor | Love | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom | World |
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Commonly called Alfred Lord Tennyson
Every man at time of Death, would fain set forth some saying that may live after his death and better humankind; for death gives life’s last word a power to live, and, like the stone-cut epitaph, remain after the vanished voice, and speak to men.
Better | Death | Life | Life | Man | Men | Power | Time | Wisdom |
Tom Stoppard, fully Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler
Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.