This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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.
Body | Change | Consciousness | Death | Eternal | Existence | Experience | Fear | Lesson | Little | Mortal | Nothing | Self | Soul | Learn |
Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is to gain; for eternity is then only a single night.
Change | Death | Eternity | Men | Nature | Soul | Unconsciousness | World |
The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
‘Tis the only discipline we are born for; all studies else are but as circular lines, and death the center where they all must meet.
Death | Discipline |
With living creatures, death is the regular, indispensable condition of the replacement of one individual by another along a phyletic mechanism and upsurge of life.
Death | Indispensable | Individual | Life | Life |
For the fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretended knowledge of the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?
Death | Evil | Fear | Good | Ignorance | Knowledge | Men | Wisdom |
Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
I still lived in the future--a habit which is the death of happiness.
The way to overcome the fear and unreality of death and the hereafter is to learn to live with eternal and invisible things here and now. If we live only for the pleasures of sense, of course we cannot take our satisfactions with us. But if we live for the things of the spirit, truth, goodness, love and their like, we shall be fitted for the life which survives the grave.
Death | Eternal | Fear | Grave | Life | Life | Love | Sense | Spirit | Truth | Learn |
The soul that flows out into God does not die; death is alien to what is submerged in life. The soul is alive, but not to itself. Stars are ever giving light, but they do not shine in the daytime; the sun shines in them, and they are hidden away in the sun’s rays. So it is with the soul; still alive, but now its life is bound up with God; or rather, it is God who lives in it.
Death is a cessation of motion, also a cessation of time - than it has to do with life, its most complex embodiment. Thinking that time brings death is a less workable assumption than a moral evasion, an example of our chronic tendency to ascribe our woes and weaknesses to external circumstance rather than to living will.
Death | Evasion | Example | Life | Life | Thinking | Time | Will | Circumstance |
The only thing we really have is nowness, is now. Sometimes when I teach these things, a person will come up to me afterward and say: “All this seems obvious! I’ve always known it. Tell me something new.” I say to him or her: “Have you actually understood, and realized, the truth of impermanence? Have you so integrated it with your every thought, breath, and movement that your life has been transformed? Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment that I am dying, and everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence become so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the pursuit of enlightenment? If you can answer ‘yes’ to both of these, then you have really understood impermanence.”
Death | Life | Life | Teach | Truth | Understanding | Will |