This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Stephen Larsen, fully H. Stephen Larsen
Inevitably we learn through changing our perspectives. Consideration of life against the background of death brings its wonder and mystery to the surface.
Consideration | Death | Life | Life | Mystery | Wonder | Learn |
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
I believe in immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings. I believe that the state we enter after death is wrought of our own motives, thoughts, and deeds... I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one in the Presence of the Lord.
Death | Deeds | Faith | Heart | Immortality | Joy | Life | Life | Light | Lord | Magic | Motives | Soul |
Faith faces everything that makes the world uncomfortable - pain, fear, loneliness, shame, death - and acts with a compassion by which these things are transformed, even exalted.
Compassion | Death | Faith | Fear | Loneliness | Pain | Shame | World |
For Death is no more than a turning of us over from Time to Eternity.
Proximity to death wakes us up. Death dispels the most potent illusion about life – that it belongs to us, and that we have all the time to we need to arrange it the way we want. But in many ways it is a gift that our life is limited, impermanent. We hold it more dear because this is so.
They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided, that love and live in the same divine principle, the root and record of their friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
Absence | Comfort | Death | Kill | Love | Society | World | Friendship | Society | Friends |
Acceptance of death is acceptance of freedom – freedom to live each day with clarity and courage… If we know we are going to die, all danger disappears. There is less fear about what can go wrong, because the worst that can possibly go wrong – our own death – is completely assured. All there is left to do is live, and live well.
Acceptance | Courage | Danger | Day | Death | Fear | Freedom | Wrong | Danger |
Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. If Absence be not Death, neither is it theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as Friends do the Seas; they live in one another still.
Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
Death | Evil | Mankind | Providence |
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
For the water animals, the ocean is like a garden; for the land animals, it is death and pain.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The world is a playground, and death is the night.
Felix Rohatyn, fully Felix George Rohatyn
Money is the standard now. It’s the new religion. We have two religions in this country, fundamentalism and money, and I don’t know which is worse. I don’t see the death of greed. I see people worried that they may have come along a couple of years too late.