“It is nonsense, Mr. Burke, to suppose I can live. My sufferings are great but they will soon be over.”
citation needed
The Battle of Trafalgar (1805)
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Horatio Nelson 38
Royal Navy Admiral 1758–1805Related quotes
“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.”
Undated letter to Joseph Johnson (October? 1792), published in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004), edited by Janet Todd, p. 206.
Section 3, Chapter 12, p. 250
The Gods Themselves (1972)
Science and Spirit interview (2004)
Context: We all eat or are eaten. That's the way life works, it's a greater rhythm. And that's why science and the understandings it has uncovered can be a source of joy.
This all relates to assent, a very important Judeo-Christian concept. "Thy will be done" is a God-kind of assent. "God works in mysterious ways," and you're supposed to give assent even if you don't like it. As a religious naturalist, I think of assent differently. Assent is saying, "Okay, for whatever reason, this is the way life works. It's an acceptance of what is. After that fundamental acceptance, I can live my life to minimize suffering and promote as much as good as I can, and try through whatever work I do to help others." We can't get around death, but we can get around poverty. We can try to avoid women being brutalized. We can curb environmental degradation.
One can start from the perspective of a religious naturalist or from the perspective of the world religions and arrive at the same place: a moral imperative that this Earth and its creatures be respected and cherished.
Then & Now: Jane Goodall (2005)
“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.”
Letter to Louis Untermeyer (8 July 1915)
1910s
"May Day"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer's credit list. Oblivion has swallowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon the best authority that for a brief space Mr. In and Mr. Out lived, breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities of their own.
During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native garments down the great highway of a great nation; were laughed at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were heard of no more.