This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation.
Regardless of their prior attitudes [on near death experience] - whether skeptical or deeply religious - and regardless of the many variations in religious beliefs and degrees of skepticism from tolerant disbelief to outspoken atheism - most of these people were convinced that they had been in the presence of some supreme and loving power and had a glimpse of a life yet to come.
Atheism | Death | Disbelief | Life | Life | People | Power | Skepticism |
Man has but three events in his life: to be born, to live, and to die. He is not conscious of his birth, he suffers at his death and he forgets to live.
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast.
It doesn’t matter what the particular problem is for a person’s faith. Having an omniscient God concept solves it. It could be the intractable and unanswerable problem of ubiquitous suffering; or how a man could be 100% God and 100% man without anything leftover, or left out; or how the death of a man on a cross saves us from sins; or why God’s failure to better communicate led to massive bloodshed between Christians themselves. It just doesn’t matter. God is omniscient. He knows why. He knows best. Therefore punting to God’s omniscience makes faith pretty much unfalsifiable, which allows believers to disregard what reason tells them by ignoring the probabilities.
Better | Death | Failure | Faith | God | Man | Omniscience | Reason | Failure | God |
Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken. Take heed, do not squander your life.
Death | Opportunity | Time |
Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, 'Did you bring joy?' The second was, 'Did you find joy?
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
Consider the death of the body in terms of God and His law. Your life, the life within you, encompasses everything within itself -- not only those whom you have lost but everything -- it includes God within itself. And if there is a God in your soul, then your soul is full, and there is no loss. And if there is a God, then there is love towards Him and towards people, towards those unfortunates who are in need of love. If you believe that everything that has happened to us in our life has been for our own good, then that which happens to us in our death is also for our own good.
Body | Death | God | Life | Life | Love | Need | Soul | God |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
All of our misfortunes reveal to us the presence in us of the divine, of the immortal, of the self-sufficient which constitutes the foundation of our life. Death reveals to us fully our true Self. That which happens to man after his death we cannot and ought not to know. We could not live or do God's work if we knew it. If what awaits us after death were worse than what we meet with here on earth, we would prize this life even more than we do now, and there is no greater impediment to the fulfillment of God's will than concern for one's own life. If what awaits us after death were better than now, then we would scorn this life and make every effort to flee from it.
Better | Death | Effort | Fulfillment | Life | Life | Man | Will | Work |
Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.
Pope Leo I, aka Pope Leo The Great, Pope Saint Leo I NULL
There is for all one common measure of joy, because as our Lord the destroyer of sin and death finds none free from charge, so is He come to free us all.
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Our life is made by the death of others.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
Age | Death | Destiny | Dread | Earth | Ends | Enough | Kill | Life | Life | Madness | Man | Music | Old age | Silence | Strength | Time | Tomorrow | Truth | Will | Youth | Youth | Old |
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley
The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.
Madame Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon
It is only by the death of self that the soul can enter into Divine Truth, and understand in part what is the light that shineth in darkness.
Death | Light | Self | Soul | Understand |
When death gives us a long lease of life, it takes as hostages all those whom we have loved.
Death |
Since every death diminishes us a little, we grieve - not so much for the death as for ourselves.
Death |