Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Tom Stoppard, fully Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler

Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.

Absence | Death | Nothing | Sound | Time | Wisdom |

William Gilmore Simms

The death of censure is the death of genius.

Censure | Death | Genius | Wisdom |

James Thomson

The world rolls round for ever like a mill; it grinds out death and life, and good and ill. It has not purpose, heart or mind or will.

Death | Good | Heart | Life | Life | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Will | Wisdom | World |

Union Prayer Book NULL

Like a child falling asleep over his toys, man loosens his grasp on earthly possessions only when death overtakes him.

Death | Man | Possessions | Wisdom | Child |

William K. Vanderbilt, fully William Kissam Vanderbilt

Inherited wealth... is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to mortality.

Ambition | Death | Wealth | Wisdom | Ambition |

Daniel Webster

The bed of death brings every human being to his pure individuality, to the intense contemplation of that deepest and most solemn of all relations - the relation between the creature and his Creator.

Contemplation | Death | Individuality | Wisdom | Contemplation |

Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss

Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature. Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race.

Death | Human race | Indifference | Nature | Race | Wisdom |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Did we think victory great? So it is - but now it seems to me, when it cannot be helped, that defeat is great and that death and dismay are great.

Death | Defeat | Wisdom | Think |

Bernard Williams

Immortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless, I shall suggest; so, in a sense, death gives the meaning to life.

Death | Immortality | Life | Life | Meaning | Sense | Wisdom |

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali

The meaning of death is not the annihilation of the spirit, but its separation from the body, and that the resurrection and day of assembly do not mean a return to a new existence after annihilation, but the bestowal of a new form or frame to the spirit.

Body | Day | Death | Existence | Meaning | Spirit |

Julius Wilhelm Zinkgräf

One who longs for death is miserable, but more miserable is he who fears it.

Death | Wisdom |

Edward Young

While man is growing, life is in decrease, and cradles rock us nearer to the tomb; our birth is nothing but our death begun.

Birth | Death | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |

Eleazar ben Ya'ir

Life, not death, is man's misfortune. It is death which gives liberty to the soul and permits it to depart to its own pure abode, there to be free from all calamity.

Calamity | Death | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Misfortune | Soul | Wisdom |

Julian Baggini

Life’s meaning has to be found in the living of life itself, and the promise of eventual death is necessary to make any action worthwhile at all.

Action | Death | Life | Life | Meaning | Promise |

Bhoja NULL

If men but saw the hand of death impending over their heads, even food would give no joy, much less the deeds that are not right.

Death | Deeds | Joy | Men | Right | Deeds |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

What indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?

Death | Love | Wisdom |