This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Discovering the ways in which you are exceptional, the particular path you are meant to follow, is your business on this earth, whether you are afflicted or not. It's just that the search takes on a special urgency when you realize you are mortal." - Bernie S. Siegel
"It is certain that the soul is either mortal or immortal. The decision of this question must make a total difference in the principles of morals. Yet philosophers have arranged their moral system entirely independent of this. What an extraordinary blindness!" - Blaise Pascal
"This body is mortal, forever in the clutch of death. But within it resides the Self, immortal, and without form. This Self, when associated in consciousness with the body, is subject to pleasure and pain; and so long as this association continues, no man can find freedom from pains and pleasures. But when the association comes to an end, there is an end also of pain and pleasure. Rising above physical consciousness, knowing the Self as distinct from the sense-organs and the mind., knowing Him in his true light, one rejoices and one is free." - Chandogya Upanishad
"Even under the most favourable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its centre." - George Santayana
"Love is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of the impending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains nevertheless only a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins presently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship into partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half plaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its consequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclination we have woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices, bearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which once seemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortal career. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. He sails henceforth for one point of the compass." - George Santayana
"The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms." - George Santayana
"The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and there are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal labors, and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be "happy" or thought that mortal man could be happy." - Hannah Arendt
"There is no death! What seems so is transition; this life of mortal breath is but a suburb of the life elysian, whose portal we all death." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"We see dimly through the mists and vapors; amid these earthly damps what seem to us but sad, funeral tapers may be heaven’s distant lamps. There is no Death! What seems so is transition; this life of mortal breath is but a suburb of the life Elysian, whose portal we call Death." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our mortal nature. Thus they become, as in the ancient fable, the harnessed steeds which bear the chariot of the sun." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The law is not a holy thing. … The law is made by very mortal people, very limited people, very opinionated people, and people who have very special interests. They make the law, they tell us what the law is, and then they tell us its holy writ." - Howard Zinn
"Mortal man thinks of himself as immortal because his race is immortal: he confuses the drop in the stream with the stream itself." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race, call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours, whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace; and glut thy self with what thy womb devours, which is no more than what is false and vain, and merely mortal dross; so little is our loss, so little is thy gain." - John Milton
"Life is probation: mortal man was made to solve the solemn problem - right or wrong." - John Quincy Adams
"No divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys; for the first lesson that terror is sent to teach us is, the value of the human soul, and the shortness of mortal time." - John Ruskin
"The "morphogenic" relationship of eternity to time is not to be thought of as sequential. Moreover, eternity being by definition outside or beyond temporality, transcendent of all categories, whether of virtue or of reason (being and nonbeing, unity and multiplicity, love and justice, forgiveness and wrath), the term and concept "God" is itself but a metaphor of the unknowing mind, connotative, not only beyond itself, but beyond thought... metaphors are equivalent as alternative signs of the high mystical experience of an absorption of mortal appearance in immortal being; for which another historical figure of speech is the "End of the World."" - Joseph Campbell
"There is no mortal whom pain and disease do not reach." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"What is human love? What is its purpose? It is the desire for union with a beautiful object in order to make eternity available to mortal life." - Marsilio Ficino
"Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation." - Oliver Goldsmith
"The purpose of life is the evolution, though self-effort, of man’s limited mortal consciousness into God Consciousness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"At death, you forget all the limitations of the physical body, and realize how free you are... You exist apart from the mortal body... There is nothing to fear. When death comes, laugh at it. Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die. Our real self, the soul, is immortal. We may sleep for a little while in that change called death, but we can never be destroyed. We exist, and that existence is eternal... Nothing can terminate the eternal consciousness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"He gave man speech, and speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe; and science struck the thrones of earth and heaven, which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind poured itself forth in all-prophetic song; and music lifted up the listening spirit until it walked, except from mortal care, Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Evils... can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good. Having no place among the Gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the earthly nature and this mortal sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like Him is to become holy and just and wise." - Plato NULL
"Every man’s soul has by the law of his birth been a spectator of eternal truth, or it would never have passed into this our mortal frame." - Plato NULL
"The soul of man is divided into three parts, intelligence, reason and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals, but reason by man alone... Reason is immortal, all else mortal." - Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
"Security is mortal’s chiefest enemy." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"On the science of beauty everywhere - Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forthe and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may." - Socrates NULL
"When [in the world] one sees nothing else, hears nothing else, recognizes nothing else: that is [participation in] the Infinite. But when one sees, hears, and recognizes only otherness: that is smallness. The Infinite is the immortal. That which is small is mortal." - Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL
"Man, it is not thy works, which are mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance." - Thomas Carlyle
"Our ideas about life inevitably shape its structure, and, because they are usually too simple, it is wise to reflect on them... simple life axioms... The first is afraid of failure, yet it is surely impossible to have love in your life at all without the possibility of its loss. The second is afraid of self-revelation and vulnerability, and yet how can there be love without an opening of the heart and considerable emotional risk? The third is afraid of mortal love - the knowledge that although love itself may be eternal, the people who love are faced with the inevitable separation of death." - Thomas Moore
"The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation." - William Shakespeare
"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; no more; and, by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life; for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?" - William Shakespeare
"To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror. " - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
"That thing of hell and eternal punishment is the most absurd, as well as the most disagreeable thought that ever entered into the head of mortal man. " - George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
"The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man." - George Steiner, fully Francis George Steiner
"This autonomy of man, this attempt of the Ego to understand itself out of itself, is the lie concerning man which we call sin. The truth about man is that his ground is not in himself but in God -- that his essence is not in self sufficient reason but in the Word, in the challenge of God, in responsibility, not in self-sufficiency. The true being of man is realized when he bases himself upon God's Word. Faith is then not an impossibility or a salto mortale [mortal leap], but that which is truly natural; and the real salto mortale (a mortal leap indeed!) is just the assertion of autonomy, self-sufficiency, God-likeness. [It is] through this usurped independence [that] man separates himself from God, and at the same time isolates himself from his fellows. Individualism is the necessary consequence of rational autonomy, just as love is the necessary consequence of faith." - Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
"People who routinely insist on the illegitimacy of blaming victims now do it. No one deserved what happened to them on September 11, neither the immediate victims and their families nor the country itself. Cannot a powerful country bleed? Are not its citizens as mortal as those anywhere? Simple human recognition along these lines does not deter the literary theorist Frederic Jameson from seeing in these horrific events "a textbook example of dialectical reversal." " - Jean Bethke Elshtain
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." - Joseph Goebbels, fully Paul Joseph Goebbels
"When all longings that are in the heart vanish, then a mortal becomes immortal and attains Brahman (infinite consciousness) here." - Katha Upanishad
"Likewise, looking deep within the mind, in the very most interior part of the self, when the mind becomes very, very quite, and one listens very carefully, in that infinite silence, the soul begins to whisper, and its feather-soft voice takes one far beyond what the mind could ever imagine, beyond anything rationality could possibly tolerate, beyond anything logic can endure. In its gentle whisperings, there are the faintest hints of infinite love, glimmers of a life that time forgot, flashes of a bliss that must not be mentioned, an infinite intersection where the mysteries of eternity breathe life into mortal time, where suffering and pain have forgotten how to pronounce their own names, this secret quiet intersection of time and the very timeless, an intersection called the soul. " - Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
"The things of mortals, mortal are as they: All pass us by, quickly to fade away, If not, we pass by them and they decay." - Lucian, aka Lucian of Samosata or Lucianus Samosatensis NULL
"As for myself, I can only exhort you to look on Friendship as the most valuable of all human possessions, no other being equally suited to the moral nature of man, or so applicable to every state and circumstance, whether of prosperity or adversity, in which he can possibly be placed. But at the same time I lay it down as a fundamental axiom that "true Friendship can only subsist between those who are animated by the strictest principles of honour and virtue." When I say this, I would not be thought to adopt the sentiments of those speculative moralists who pretend that no man can justly be deemed virtuous who is not arrived at that state of absolute perfection which constitutes, according to their ideas, the character of genuine wisdom. This opinion may appear true, perhaps, in theory, but is altogether inapplicable to any useful purpose of society, as it supposes a degree of virtue to which no mortal was ever capable of rising." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility." - Mario Vargas Llosa, fully Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa
"Religion means goal and way, politics implies end and means. The political end is recognizable by the fact that it may be attained—in success—and its attainment is historically recorded. The religious goal remains, even in man's highest experiences, that which simply provides direction on the mortal way; it never enters into historical consummation." - Martin Buber
"In describing what the Devil is, it says, "Evil; a lie; error; neither corporeality nor mind; the opposite of Truth; a belief in sin, sickness, and death; animal magnetism or hypnotism; the lust of the flesh, which saith: ‘I am life and intelligence in matter. There is more than one mind, for I am mind, - a wicked mind, self-made or created by a tribal god and put into the opposite of mind, termed matter, thence to reproduce a mortal universe, including man, not after the image and likeness of Spirit, but after its own image." - Mary Baker Eddy
"This world is a most holy Temple, into which man is brought there to behold Statues and Images, not wrought by mortal hands, but such as by the secret thought of God hath made sensible, as intelligible unto us." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"Of mortal justice if thou scorn the rod, believe and tremble, thou art judged of God." - Milo Sweetman
"There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance; and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase it." - Nathaniel Hawthorne