This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Every vital organization owes its birth and life to an exciting and daring idea.
Birth | Daring | Life | Life | Organization |
The death of the advertising agency and the propaganda bureau will be one of the surest signs of the birth of a new society.
Advertising | Birth | Death | Society | Will | Propaganda |
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.
Birth | Conscience | History | Instinct | Man | Mind | Self | Self-interest |
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
The soul that would experience this birth must detach herself from all outward things: within herself completely at one with herself... You must have an exalted mind an a burning heart in which, nevertheless, reign silence and stillness.
All which a man has belongs to those who gave him birth and brought him up, and that he must do all that he can to minister to them, first, in his property, secondly, in his person, and thirdly, in his soul, in return for the endless care and travail which they bestowed upon him of old, in the days of his infancy, and which he is now to pay back to them when they are old and in the extremity of their need.
Birth | Care | Infancy | Man | Need | Property | Soul | Old |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
Man is neither by birth nor disposition a savage, nor of unsocial habits, but only becomes so by indulging in vices contrary to his nature.
Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities... There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand that this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
Behavior | Birth | Culture | Custom | Experience | History | Individual | Life | Life | Little | Time | Understand |
Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
Both bondage and liberation are the fictions of our ignorance. They do not really exist in the Atman. Just as a piece of rope remains rope, whether or not we mistake it for a snake. The imagined snake does not really exist in the rope. The Atman is infinite, without parts, beyond action... There is neither birth nor death, neither bound nor aspiring soul, neither liberated soul nor seeker after liberation - this is the ultimate and absolute truth.
Absolute | Action | Birth | Death | Ignorance | Mistake | Soul | Truth |
The day of our birth is one day's advance towards our death.
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
The birth of science was the death of superstition.
Birth | Death | Science | Superstition |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
The staggering coherence of our universe tells us that all its stars and galaxies are interconnected in some way. And the astonishing fine-tuning of the physical laws and constants of our universe suggests that at its birth our universe may have been connected with prior universes
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
Death is certain for those who are born, and birth is certain for the dead. This is inevitable and therefore a wise man should not grieve over it.
Birth | Inevitable | Man | Wise |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star.
Gabriel García Márquez, aka Gabo
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.