This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"When it is said and done, life’s journey isn’t about humanity in general, or even the person next door. It’s about you and me. Our individual lives are the focus, a picture framed by our birth and death. Our personal goals and principles are under scrutiny; our personal success or failure is in the balance." - Os Guiness
"A child is born through the rending of the womb; a man is born through the rending of the world. The call to prayer signalizes both kinds of birth, the first is uttered by the lips, the second by the very soul." - Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
"We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that his nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." - Abraham Lincoln
"In the field of modern cosmology, the first principle is called “the Cosmological Principle.” It says that the universe has no center, that it has the same properties throughout. Every place in the universe has, in this sense, equal rights. How can the human race, which has evolved in a universe of such fundamental equality, fail to strive for a society without violence and terror? How can we fail to build a world in which the rights due to every human being from birth are respected?" - Fang Lizhe
"Children who are closer to their birth, and thus to the experience of oneness, rightly reject hypocrisy." - Vimalia McClure
"No one who is fit to live need fear to die... To us here, death is the most terrible word we know. But when we have tasted its reality, it will mean to us birth, deliverance, a new creation of ourselves." - George S. Merriam
"People who know they will die live very carefully. Not careful as in fearful; careful as in full of care. Every word, every act, every relationship holds the possibility of giving birth to something filled with great care. And that thing need not be showy or dramatic, for the most potent spiritual acts are often acts of breathtaking simplicity: a simple prayer, a sip of wine and a piece of bread, a single breath in meditation, a sprinkling of water on the forehead, an exchange of rings, a kind word, a hand on the cheek, a blessing." - Wayne Muller
"There is one God, eternal truth is his name, Creator of all things, and the all-pervading spirit. Fearless and without hatred, timeless and formless. Beyond birth and death, self-enlightened." - Guru Nanak
"Death is but a new birth of the spirit into the great unknown." - Pritish Nandy
"Once upon a time, Buddha relates, a certain king of Benares, desiring to divert himself, gathered together a number of beggars blind from birth and offered a prize to the one who should give him the best account of an elephant. The first beggar who examined the elephant chanced to lay hold of a leg, and reported that an elephant was a tree-trunk; the second, laying hold of the tail, declared that an elephant was like a rope; another, who seized an ear, insisted that an elephant was like a palm-leaf; and so on. The beggars fell to quarrelling with one another, and the king was greatly amused. Ordinary teachers who have grasped this or that aspect of truth quarrel with one another, while only a Buddha knows the whole." - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
"All ceremonies of transition, such as birth... marriage and death correspond very closely with each other in that on every occasion they repeat the drama of primeval creation." - Hans Schärer
"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." - Hans Schärer
"The function of civil law is not to teach theology or even the moral views of the legislator… The morality of divorce, birth control, liquor traffic and the like are one thing. Civil legislation about them is quite another." - Gustave Weigel
"It is the business of the statesman to provide a decent burial for the past and to facilitate the birth of the future." - Victor Wellesley, fully Sir Victor Alexander Augustus Henry Wellesley
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; the Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, hath had elsewhere its setting. And cometh from afar." - William Wordsworth
"Bear well in mind that your whole past was but a birth and a becoming." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Know then that all true creation is not a prejudgment of the Future, not a quest of utopian chimeras, but the apprehending of a new aspect of the Present, which is a heap of raw materials bequeathed by the Past, and it is for you neither to grumble at it nor to rejoice over it, for, like yourself, all these things merely are, having come to birth." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"You give birth to that on which you fix your mind." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Intellectual virtues owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit... From this fact it is plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature." - Aristotle NULL
"Teachers, who educate children, deserve more honor than parents who merely give them birth; for the latter provided mere life, while the former ensure a good life." - Aristotle NULL
"Teachers, who educate children, deserve more honor than parents, who merely gave them birth; for the latter provided mere life, while the former ensure a good life." - Aristotle NULL
"The aim, and test, of progress under a truly Christian dispensation on Earth would not lie in the field of mundane social life; the field would be the spiritual life of individual souls in their passage through this earthly life from birth into this world to death out of it." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Every day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and sleep a little death." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Children learn at their own pace, and it is a mistake to try to force them. The great incentive to effort, all through life, is experience of success after initial difficulties. The difficulties must not be so great as to cause discouragement, or so small as not to stimulate effort. From birth to death, this is a fundamental principle. It is by what we do ourselves that we learn." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"For certain is death for the born and certain is birth for the dead; therefore over the inevitable thou shouldst not grieve." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"For that which is born death is certain, and for the dead birth is certain. Therefore grieve not over that which is unavoidable." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"For that which is born, death is certain; and for the dead, birth is certain. Therefore, grieve not over that which is unavoidable." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"Emulation and imitation are of twin birth." - Charles Buxton
"This metaphor of a mountain path allows us to reconcile an ancient paradox about whether we truly have free will or whether our life is somehow predestined. At the moment of birth we are each given a specific inner mountain to climb, reflecting the force of predestination. How we climb and the time we take are up to us, reflecting the power of free will. In other words, we're given the playing field, but we choose how to play the game. We always have the power of choice, discipline, responsibility and commitment. No life path is harder or easier, better or worse, than any other, except to the degree we make it so." - Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
"People and societies who cannot see any purpose in their existence beyond the material and the tangible must live chartlessly, and must live in spiritual misery, because they cannot overcome the greatest fact and mystery of human life, next to birth, which is death." - Dorothy Thompson
"In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"There is a kind of greatness which does not depend upon fortune; it is a certain manner that distinguishes us, and which seems to destine us for great things; it is the value we insensibly set upon ourselves; it is by this quality that we gain the deference of other men, and it is this which commonly raises us more above them, than birth, rank, or even merit itself." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Nobility of soul is more honorable than nobility of birth." - Dutch Proverbs
"Of all vanities of fopperies, the vanity of high birth is the greatest. True nobility is derived from virtue, not from birth. Titles, indeed, may be purchased, but virtue is the only coin that makes the bargain valid." - Edmund Burke
"Nobility of birth commonly abateth industry." - Francis Bacon
"Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth that in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?" - Garry Wills
"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval." - George Santayana
"Periods of confused anarchy… seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society." - Gustave Le Bon
"Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition." - Helen Hayes
"It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"The death of dogma is the birth of morality." - Immanuel Kant
"Every vital organization owes its birth and life to an exciting and daring idea." - James Bryant Conant
"Mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime - birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death - in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time. For all the symbolic narratives, images, rites, and festivals by which life within the cultural monad is controlled and defined are of the order of the way of art. Their effect, therefore, is to wake the intellect to realizations equivalent to those of the insights that produced them." - Joseph Campbell
"I shall die now, for my soul has attained its goal. I have finally extended my knowledge to a world beyond the narrow cavern of my birth. This is the design of Life... This is the secret of Existence." - Kahlil Gibran
"The greatest event in natural history was the birth of conscience in the human mind. That was the moment when man put aside his strongest natural instinct, which was self-interest." - Pierre Lecomte du Noüy
"The death of the advertising agency and the propaganda bureau will be one of the surest signs of the birth of a new society." - Lewis Mumford