This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant - birth, struggle, and death are constant - and so is love, though we may not always think so - and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths - change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not - safety, for example, or money or power. One clings then to chimeras, but which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope - the entire possibility - of freedom disappears.
Change | Death | Freedom | Hope | Men | Money | Nature | Responsibility | Sense | Trust | Think |
Heaven and God are best discerned through tears; scarcely perhaps are discerned at all without them. The constant association of prayer with the hour of bereavement and the scenes of death suffice to show this.
Association | Bereavement | Death | God | Prayer | Association | God |
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
That which is so universal as death must be a benefit.
Death |
We are drowning our youngsters in violence, cynicism and sadism piped into the living room and even the nursery. The grandchildren of the kids who used to weep because the Little Match Girl froze to death now feel cheated if she isn't slugged, raped and thrown into a Bessemer converter.
The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right which does not exist. No one has a right to kill an enemy except when he cannot make him a slave, and the right to enslave him cannot therefore be derived from the right to kill him. It is accordingly an unfair exchange to make him buy at the price of his liberty his life, over which the victor holds no right. Is it not clear that there is a vicious circle in founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death?
Conquest | Death | Enemy | Kill | Liberty | Life | Life | Price | Right | Slavery | War |
Joan Halifax, fully Roshi Joan Jiko Halifax
In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, "Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us."
Joan Halifax, fully Roshi Joan Jiko Halifax
Death can come at any moment. You could die this afternoon; you could die tomorrow morning; you could die on your way to work; you could die in your sleep. Most of us try to avoid the sense that death can come at any time, but its timing is unknown to us. Can we live each day as if it were our last? Can we relate to one another as if there were no tomorrow?
Habit accustoms us to everything. What we see too much, we no longer imagine; and it is only imagination which makes us feel the ills of others. It is thus by dint of seeing death and suffering that priests and doctors become pitiless.
Death | Imagination | Suffering |
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
The contemplation of night should lead to elevating rather than to depressing ideas. Who can fix his mind on transitory and earthly things, in presence of those glittering myriads of worlds; and who can dread death or solitude in the midst of this brillings, animated universe, composed of countless suns and worlds, all full of light and life and motion?
Contemplation | Death | Dread | Life | Life | Light | Mind | Solitude | Contemplation |
John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
Death | Failure | Good | Influence | Life | Life | Man | Men | Pleasure | Thought | Uncertainty | Failure | Thought |
One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
Death |
John Oxenham, pen name for Wiliam Arthur Dunkerley
For death begins with life's first breath And life begins at touch of death.
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Death |