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.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
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 |
Plainly this is not an age of the meditative man. It is a squinting, sprinting, shoving age. Substitutes for repose are million dollar business. Silence, already a nation's most critical shortage, is almost a nasty word. Modern man may or may not be obsolete, but he is certainly wired for sound.
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.
We ought to repose on Divine Providence, not only for what concerns temporal things, but much more for what relates to our spiritual life and perfection.
Life | Life | Perfection | Providence | Repose |
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.