This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life.
Death | Desire | Eternal | Man | Nothing | Reality | Time | Wants | Wishes | Value |
Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
Ambition is the death of thought.
Death |
Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL
Whenever a thing changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit. The temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do so for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
Death | Eternal | Eternity | Immortality | Life | Life | Present | Space | Survival | Time | Will |
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction. For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire that owed their inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them.
Body | Death | Desire | Inspiration | Love | Past | Power | Time | Will |
There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of softmindedness. A nation or civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
Civilization | Death | Enough | Hope | Little | Luxury | Men | World |
Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body—we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!
Death | Technology |
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell. Death separates the soul from the body, but love separates all things from the soul.
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
The sorrow of death, on closer analysis, turns out to be rooted in selfishness. The person, who loses his beloved may intellectually know that life, as a whole, has elsewhere compensated for the loss; but his only feeling is, What is that to me? Death becomes a cause of unending sorrow, when a man looks at it from his own personal point of view; from the point of view of life in general, it is an episode of minor importance.
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
This New Life is endless, and even after my physical death it will be kept alive by those who live the life of complete renunciation of falsehood, lies, hatred, anger, greed and lust; and who, to accomplish all this, do no lustful actions, do no harm to anyone, do no backbiting, do not seek material possessions or power, who accept no homage, neither covet honor nor shun disgrace, and fear no one and nothing; by those who rely wholly and solely on God, and who love God purely for the sake of loving; who believe in the lovers of God and in the reality of Manifestation, and yet do not expect any spiritual or material reward; who do not let go the hand of Truth, and who, without being upset by calamities, bravely and wholeheartedly face all hardships with one hundred percent cheerfulness, and give no importance to caste, creed and religious ceremonies.
Creed | Death | Fear | God | Greed | Harm | Honor | Life | Life | Love | Possessions | Reality | Will | God |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
A sane attitude to death is possible only if life is considered impersonally and without any attachment to particular forms, but this is the very thing which the worldly man finds it difficult to do, because of his entanglement with specific forms.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere.
Michelangelo, aka Michaelangelo Buonarroti, fully Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni NULL
O night, O sweetest time, though black of hue, with peace you force all the restless work to end; those who exalt you see and understand, and he is sound of mind who honours you. You cut the thread of tired thoughts, for so you offer calm in your moist shade; you send to this low sphere the dreams where we ascend up to the highest, where I long to go. Shadow of death that brings to quiet close all miseries that plague the heart and soul, for those in pain the last and best of cures; you heal the flesh of its infirmities, dry and our tears and shut away our toil, and free the good from wrath and fretting cares.
Death | Dreams | Force | Good | Heart | Mind | Pain | Peace | Quiet | Sound | Tears | Work |
Law is not born of nature, near the springs frequented by the first shepherds; law is born from real battles, victories, massacres, conquests which have their dates and their heroes of horror. The law is born in torched villages, ravaged lands; it is born with the notorious innocents suffering in the throes of death as the sun rises. But this does not mean that the law and the State are a kind of armistice in these wars, or the definitive sanction of victories. The law is not pacification, because under the law, war continues to rage within all the mechanisms of power even the most lawful. It is war that is the motor of institutions and of order: peace, right down to the smallest of its cogs, obscurely engages in war. In other words, we must decypher war in peace: war is the very cypher of peace. Thus we are at war with each other; a battle front runs through our entire society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battle front which places each of us in one camp or another. There is no neutral subject. We are of necessity someone's adversary.
Battle | Death | Law | Necessity | Power | Rage | Right | Suffering | War |
From the discovery of that necessity which inevitably reduces man to nothing, we have shifted to the scornful contemplation of that nothing which is existence itself. Fear in the face of the absolute limit of death turns inward in a continuous irony; man disarms it in advance, making it an object of derision by giving it an everyday, tamed form, by constantly renewing it in the spectacle of life, by scattering it throughout the vices, the difficulties, and the absurdities of all men. Death's annihilation is no longer anything because it was already everything, because life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. The head that will become a skull is already empty.
Absolute | Contemplation | Death | Discovery | Existence | Fear | Giving | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Nothing | Object | Will | Discovery | Contemplation |
Together with war [the death penalty] was for a long time the other form of the right of the sword; it constituted the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or his person... As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise - and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings - made it more difficult to apply the death penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction. Hence capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility, and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.
Awakening | Capital punishment | Crime | Danger | Death | Feelings | Kill | Life | Life | Logic | People | Power | Punishment | Reason | Right | Time | War | Danger |