This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I must first clear up an ambiguity in the phrase 'doing evil that good may come'. We cannot ask whether e. g. Caesar's death was a good or bad thing to happen; there are various titles under which it may be called good or bad. One might very well say e. g. that a violent death was a bad thing to happen to a living organism but a good thing to happen to a man who claimed divine worship, and this would again leave it open whether doing Caesar to death was a good or bad thing to do for Brutus and the rest. Now when I speak of 'not doing evil that good may come', what I mean is that certain sorts of act are such bad things to do that they must never be done to secure any good or avoid any evil. For A to kill a man or cut off his arm is not necessarily a bad thing to do, though it is necessarily bad that such a thing should happen to a living organism. Only by a fallacy of equivocation can people argue that if you accept the principle of not doing evil that good may come, then you must be against capital punishment and surgical operations.
Ambiguity | Capital punishment | Death | Equivocation | Evil | Fallacy | Good | Kill | Man | People | Punishment |
Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams… Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think scientifically that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution.
Allegories | Death | Expectation | Fate | Feelings | Hope | Ideas | Impression | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Nothing | Prison | Thought | World | Fate | Afraid | Expectation | Old | Think | Thought |
A good death does honor to a whole life.
Men of courage, not satisfied with words, but ever searching for the means to transform them into action, — men of integrity for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life contrary to their principles, — intrepid souls who know that it is necessary to dare in order to succeed, — these are the lonely sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently roused to raise openly the banner of insurrection and to march, arms in hand, to the conquest of their rights.
Battle | Conquest | Death | Integrity | Life | Life | Means | Men | Order |
Sören Kierkegaard has another answer: human existence is possible as existence not in despair, as existence not in tragedy; it is possible as existence in faith... Faith is the belief that in God the impossible is possible, that in Him time and eternity are one, that both life and death are meaningful.
Belief | Death | Eternity | Existence | Faith | God | Life | Life | Time | God |
Only the doctor and the judge have the right to inflict the death penalty without receiving the same.
Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.
I work all day, and get half drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse – The good not used, the love not given, time Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never: But at the total emptiness forever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says no rational being Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realization of it rages out In furnace fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no-one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can't escape Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Courage | Day | Death | Dread | Fear | Good | Impulse | Life | Life | Light | Love | Means | Mind | Nothing | People | Religion | Remorse | Taste | Thought | Time | Will | Work | World | Wrong | Afraid | Think | Thought |
Peter wanted a fellowship with Christ without consequence--official reprisal, ostracism, torture, execution. We want citizenship in the empire and its attendant goodies--a 'deterrent' nuclear blanket and the 'right' to consume seven times our share of the world's output, without consequences--war, ecological devastation, death in the Third and Fourth Worlds. We Christians forget (if we ever learned) that attempts to redress real or imagined injustice by violent means are merely another exercise in denial--denial of God and her nonviolence towards us, denial of love of neighbor, denial of laws essential to our being. 'I do not know the man' takes many forms, suffers many translations. But all end the same--a denial of our humanity, our daughtership or sonship in God.
Citizenship | Death | God | Injustice | Injustice | Love | Means | God |
The goodness of the heart is shown in deeds of peacefulness and kindness. Hand and heart Are one thing with the good, as thou should'st be. Do my words trouble thee? Then treasure them, pain overgot gives peace, as death doth Heaven. All things that speak of Heaven speak of peace.
Death | Deeds | Heart | Heaven | Pain | Words | Deeds | Trouble |
They are all so-called Christian nations, but... this superimposed religion... does not penetrate into the core of their souls. It has no relation to their daily experience... It is a key to open a heaven after death and not a key with which to force open the portals of this life.
Because success is such a weasel word anyway, it's such a horribly American word, and it's such a vamp and, I think it's a death trap.
The death-change comes. Death is another life. We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straight another golden chamber of the king's larger than this we leave, and lovelier. And then in shadowy glimpses, disconnect, the story, flower-like, closes thus its leaves. The will of God is all in all. He makes, destroys, remakes, for His own pleasure, all.
'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 |
It is by no means a fact that death is the worst of all evils; when it comes it is an alleviation to mortals who are worn out with sufferings.
He who fears not death fears not a threat. [He who does not fear death cares naught for threats.]
Freedom will become a myth. “Inalienable rights will be alienated; Declarations of Rights either abolished or used only as beautiful screens for an unadulterated coercion. Governments will become more and more hoary, fraudulent, and tyrannical, giving bombs instead of bread; death instead of freedom; violence instead of law.” Security will fade; the population will become weary and scared. “Suicide, mental disease, and crime will grow.”