“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.
“The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late.”
Character of the Late Dr. S. Annesley (1715).
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The good die early, and the bad die late." by Daniel Defoe?
Daniel Defoe43
English trader, writer and journalist 1660–1731Related quotes
“Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IV, Line 843.
“And doomed to death, though fated not to die.”
John Dryden book The Hind and the Panther
Pt. I, line 8.
The Hind and the Panther (1687)
“The idea is to die young as late as possible.”
Ashley Montagu (1905–1999) British-American anthropologist
“When good men die their goodness does not perish,
But lives though they are gone.”
Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright
Temenidæ Frag. 734
Context: When good men die their goodness does not perish,
But lives though they are gone. As for the bad,
All that was theirs dies and is buried with them.
Sallustius Roman philosopher and writer
IX. On Providence, Fate, and Fortune.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: To believe that human things, especially their material constitution, are ordered not only by celestial beings but by the celestial bodies is a reasonable and true belief. Reason shows that health and sickness, good fortune and bad fortune, arise according to our deserts from that source. But to attribute men's acts of injustice and lust to fate, is to make ourselves good and the Gods bad. Unless by chance a man meant by such a statement that in general all things are for the good of the world and for those who are in a natural state, but that bad education or weakness of nature changes the goods of Fate for the worse. Just as it happens that the Sun, which is good for all, may be injurious to persons with ophthalmia or fever.
“It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London.”
Charles Dickens book Sketches by Boz
Characters, Ch. 1 : Thoughts About People
Sketches by Boz (1836-1837)
Context: It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London. He awakens no sympathy in the breast of any single person; his existence is a matter of interest to no one save himself; he cannot be said to be forgotten when he dies, for no one remembered him when he was alive. There is a numerous class of people in this great metropolis who seem not to possess a single friend, and whom nobody appears to care for. Urged by imperative necessity in the first instance, they have resorted to London in search of employment, and the means of subsistence. It is hard, we know, to break the ties which bind us to our homes and friends, and harder still to efface the thousand recollections of happy days and old times, which have been slumbering in our bosoms for years, and only rush upon the mind, to bring before it associations connected with the friends we have left, the scenes we have beheld too probably for the last time, and the hopes we once cherished, but may entertain no more. These men, however, happily for themselves, have long forgotten such thoughts. Old country friends have died or emigrated; former correspondents have become lost, like themselves, in the crowd and turmoil of some busy city; and they have gradually settled down into mere passive creatures of habit and endurance.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate
Source: Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Line 172
James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat
Garfield (24 September 1881)
“When good Americans die, they go to Paris"
"Where do bad Americans go?"
"They stay in America”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Act I.
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Context: Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.