“That which we die for lives as wholly as that which we live for dies.”

— E.E. Cummings

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "That which we die for lives as wholly as that which we live for dies." by E.E. Cummings?

E.E. Cummings 208

American poet 1894–1962

Related quotes

“Redeemers always reach the world too late.
God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.”

Peter Porter (1929–2010) British poet

"A Tale of Two Pieties", in The Chair of Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 51.

“Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.”

Lewis Carroll book Sylvie and Bruno

Preface
Sylvie and Bruno (1889)
Context: I believe this thought, of the possibility of death — if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life — that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' — but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man — and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!

“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.”

Ippen (1239–1289) Japanese Buddhist monk, founder of the Jishu school.

"Words Handed Down by Disciples" (Chapter 9).
No Abode: The Record of Ippen (1997)

“In living we die, in dying we live.”

Ted Dekker (1962) American writer

“We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

in an interview http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n12/htdocs/ursula-k-le-guin-440.php?country=uk in Vice Magazine.
Context: Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless. We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.