“To become solitary and simple in utter aloneness -- living wholly unconcerned about the multitude of worldly affairs, and abandoning and disentangling yourself from all things -- is to die. We are born alone; we die alone.”
"Words Handed Down by Disciples" (Chapter 9).
No Abode: The Record of Ippen (1997)
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Ippen 8
Japanese Buddhist monk, founder of the Jishu school. 1239–1289Related quotes
“Born alone, die alone, no crew to keep my crown or throne”
The World Is Yours
On Albums, Illmatic (1994)
Source: The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
“We do not die. Each human being is alone in the world.”
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: We do not die. Each human being is alone in the world. It seems absurd, contradictory to say this, and yet it is so. But there are many human beings like me. No, we cannot say that. In saying that, we set ourselves outside the truth in a kind of abstraction. All we can say is: I am alone.
And that is why we do not die.
The Christian Year. Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“Dar’st thou amid the varied multitude
To live alone, an isolated thing?”
"The Solitary" (1810), st. 1
Woolvington.
The Children of Men (1992)
“That which we die for lives as wholly as that which we live for dies.”
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: Once, bowed in the evening light, the dead man had said, "After my death, life will continue. Every detail in the world will continue to occupy the same place quietly. All the traces of my passing will die little by little, and the void I leave behind will be filled once more."
He was mistaken in saying so. He carried all the truth with him. Yet we, we saw him die. He was dead for us, but not for himself. I feel there is a fearfully difficult truth here which we must get, a formidable contradiction. But I hold on to the two ends of it, groping to find out what formless language will translate it. Something like this: "Every human being is the whole truth." I return to what I heard. We do not die since we are alone. It is the others who die. And this sentence, which comes to my lips tremulously, at once baleful and beaming with light, announces that death is a false god.