Quotes about death
page 7

“I think that we do not deserve life, I think that religions have been and continue to be instruments of domination and death.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Interview to the newspaper "O Globo", 2009.

Life, Religion, Thinking

“This reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, Death.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 38
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

Justice

“When someone's body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit (which it derives from the spiritual world), then we say that the individual has died. This happens when the lungs' breathing and the heart's systolic motion have ceased. The person, though, has not died at all. We are only separated from the physical nature that was useful to us in the world. The essential person is actually still alive. I say that the essential person is still alive because we are not people because of our bodies but because of our spirits. After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks, and thought and affection together make us the people we are. We can see, then, that when we die we simply move from one world into another. This is why in the inner meaning of the Bible, "death" means resurrection and a continuation of life.”

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) Swedish 18th century scientist and theologian

Heaven and Hell #445

Life, People, World, Nature

“When the feeling of pleasure or pain in the soul is most intense, all of us naturally suppose that the object of this intense feeling is then plainest and truest; but this is not the case. …because each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, and engrosses her and makes her believe that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and ways, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below, but is always saturated with the body; so that she soon [after death] sinks into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Pain, Pleasure, World, Way

“When you read Genesis, you find that it was Adam who was given the specific instruction not to eat the fruit of the tree. You see, Adam was created first, and God had ordained that he was to be the head of his family. He then gave Adam instruction as to what was expected of him. Adam, of course, would've told Eve, because she was really under his headship. Therefore, when Eve took the fruit, Adam shouldn't have joined her. He should've gone directly to God and asked for a solution. Instead, he joined his wife and brought sin and death into the world. You know, this is a lesson we need to learn today about men taking the leadership role in their families.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Did Adam have a Bellybutton?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2000)

Men, God, World, Family

“In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhuman, but no one ever considered war a school of humanity.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 3

Hostility, War, School, Failure

“If then we would indeed be “filled with wisdom and spiritual understanding;” if we would “walk worthy of the Lord unto all well pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;” here let us fix our eyes! “Laying aside every weight, and the sin that does so easily beset us; let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Here best we may learn the infinite importance of Christianity. How little it can deserve to be treated in that slight and superficial way, in which it is in these days regarded by the bulk of nominal Christians, who are apt to think it may be enough, and almost equally pleasing to God, to be religious in any way, and upon any system. What exquisite folly it must be to risk the soul on such a venture, in direct contradiction to the dictates of reason, and the express declaration of the word of God! “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?”
LOOKING UNTO JESUS!
Here we shall best learn the duty and reasonableness of an absolute and unconditional surrender of soul and body to the will and service of God.—“We are not our own; for we are bought with a price,” and must “therefore” make it our grand concern to “glorify God with our bodies and our spirits, which are God’s.” Should we be base enough, even if we could do it with safety, to make any reserves in our returns of service to that gracious Saviour, who “gave up himself for us?” If we have formerly talked of compounding by the performance of some commands for the breach of others; can we now bear the mention of a composition of duties, or of retaining to ourselves the right of practising little sins! The very suggestion of such an idea fills us with indignation and shame, if our hearts be not dead to every sense of gratitude.
LOOKING UNTO JESUS!
Here we find displayed, in the most lively colours, the guilt of sin, and how hateful it must be to the perfect holiness of that Being, “who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” When we see that, rather than sin should go unpunished, “God spared not his own Son,” but “was pleased[99], to bruise him and put him to grief” for our sakes; how vainly must impenitent sinners flatter themselves with the hope of escaping the vengeance of Heaven, and buoy themselves up with I know not what desperate dreams of the Divine benignity!
Here too we may anticipate the dreadful sufferings of that state, “where shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth;” when rather than that we should undergo them, “the Son of God” himself, who “thought it no robbery to be equal with God,” consented to take upon him our degraded nature with all its weaknesses and infirmities; to be “a man of sorrows,” “to hide not his face from shame and spitting,” “to be wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities,” and at length to endure the sharpness of death, “even the death of the Cross,” that he might “deliver us from the wrath to come,” and open the kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
LOOKING UNTO JESUS!
Here best we may learn to grow in the love of God! The certainty of his pity and love towards repenting sinners, thus irrefragably demonstrated, chases away the sense of tormenting fear, and best lays the ground in us of a reciprocal affection. And while we steadily contemplate this wonderful transaction, and consider in its several relations the amazing truth, that “God spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all;” if our minds be not utterly dead to every impulse of sensibility, the emotions of admiration, of preference, of hope, and trust, and joy, cannot but spring up within us, chastened with reverential fear, and softened and quickened by overflowing gratitude. Here we shall become animated by an abiding disposition to endeavour to please our great Benefactor; and by a humble persuasion, that the weakest endeavours of this nature will not be despised by a Being, who has already proved himself so kindly affected towards us. Here we cannot fail to imbibe an earnest desire of possessing his favour, and a conviction, founded on his own declarations thus unquestionably confirmed, that the desire shall not be disappointed. Whenever we are conscious that we have offended this gracious Being, a single thought of the great work of Redemption will be enough to fill us with compunction. We shall feel a deep concern, grief mingled with indignant shame, for having conducted ourselves so unworthily towards one who to us has been infinite in kindness: we shall not rest till we have reason to hope that he is reconciled to us; and we shall watch over our hearts and conduct in future with a renewed jealousy, [Pg 243] lest we should again offend him. To those who are ever so little acquainted with the nature of the human mind, it were superfluous to remark, that the affections and tempers which have been enumerated, are the infallible marks and the constituent properties of Love. Let him then who would abound and grow in this Christian principle, be much conversant with the great doctrines of the Gospel.
It is obvious, that the attentive and frequent consideration of these great doctrines, must have a still more direct tendency to produce and cherish in our minds the principle of the love of Christ.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

Source: Real Christianity (1797), p. 240-243.

Love, Wisdom, God, Hate

“Life is but a moment. Death is but a moment, too.”

Friedrich Schiller Mary Stuart

Das Leben ist Nur ein Moment, der Tod ist auch nur einer!
Maria Stuart, Act III, sc. vi (1800)

Life

“No art is superior to another one, but every art looks for expertise and perfection. This is life, which continues; this is why there is no death. There is continuation. There is no silence. There is a continuation of thought.”

Marcel Marceau (1923–2007) French mime and actor

Interview The Lantern (5 April 2001)

Life, Art, Silence, Perfection

“Learning proceeds until death and only then does it stop. … Its purpose cannot be given up for even a moment. To pursue it is to be human, to give it up to be a beast.”

Xun Zi (-313–-238 BC) Ancient Chinese philosopher

Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 258
An Exhortation to Learning

Learning

“There are but three events in a man's life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Il n'y a pour l'homme que trois événements: naître, vivre et mourir. Il ne se sent pas naître, il souffre à mourir, et il oublie de vivre.
Aphorism 48
Les Caractères (1688), De l'Homme

Life, Pain, Birth, Forgetting

“I would rather that this people should starve to death in the mountains, than to have the Lord Almighty hand us over to a cursed, infernal mob. I would rather go down to the grave in peace than to fight a mob, unless the Lord would give me enough Saints to fight and kill the poor devils; in such case I wish to live and fight them. But I never want to see a mob again drive and tread under foot the Saints.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 3:224 (March 2, 1856)
1850s

People, Peace, Mountain, Fight

“We too must suffer all the suffering around us. We all have not one body, but we have one way of growing, and this leads us through all anguish, whether in this or in that form. Just as the child develops through all the stages of life right into old age and to death (and fundamentally to the earlier stage the later one seems out of reach, in relation both to desire and to fear), so also do we develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. There is no room for justice in this context, but neither is there any room either for fear of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

103
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

Life, Age, World, Fear

“"Property" has acquired an almost greater sacredness in our social conscience than religion: for offence against the latter there is lenience, for damage to the former no forgiveness. Since Property is deemed the base of all stability, the more's the pity that not all are owners, that in fact the greater proportion of Society comes disinherited into the world. Society is manifestly thus reduced by its own principle to such a perilous inquietude, that it is compelled to reckon all its laws for an impossible adjustment of this conflict; and protection of property — for which in its widest international sense the weaponed host is specially maintained — can truly mean no else than a defence of the possessors against the non-possessors. Many as are the earnest and sagacious brains that have applied themselves to this problem, its solution, such as that at last suggested of an equal division of all possessions, has not as yet been found amenable; and it seems as if the State's disposal of the apparently so simple idea of Property had driven a beam into the body of mankind that dooms it to a lingering death of agony.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Know Thyself (1881)

World, Religion, Law, Idea

“How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And absorbed in the new life he leads,
He recks not, he heeds
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change.”

Robert Browning After

After.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Life, Sense, Change

“As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy.”

Stefan Zweig book Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman

Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927)

Life, Reality, Sense, Drawing

“Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know that this is of a truth — that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. …For which reason also, I am not angry with my accusers, or my condemners; they have done me no harm, although neither of them meant to do me any good; and for this I may gently blame them.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

41c–e
Plato, Apology

Life, Truth, Evil

“Forgive me, that was the soldier speaking. Now this is the man speaking again. And the man is more than the soldier. I can bear anything. Death is a more solemn thing than all the earthly trash.”

Emilio De Bono (1866–1944) Italian General

Quoted in "Mussolini: Twilight and Fall" - Page 129 - by Roman Dąbrowski - Italy - 1956

Forgiveness

“One of the things that struck me as near miraculous about music, especially in a rather nihilistic and atheistic society, is that it really does fill the void which was left by the death of God. And it's because you cannot rationally critique music. It speaks to you, it speaks of meaning, and no matter what you say about it, no matter how cynical you are, you cannot put a crowbar underneath that and toss it aside.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Drinking from the firehose with Howard Bloom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhlL7IjaZNI?t=29m55s Other

God, Music

“If death had only been the end of all, the wicked would have had a good bargain in dying, for they would have been happily quit not only of their body, but of their own evil together with their souls. But now, as the soul plainly appears to be immortal, there is no release or salvation from evil except the attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom. For the soul when on her progress to the world below takes nothing with her but nurture and education…”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Wisdom, World, Education, Soul

“I heard the Master preach.
“Don’t be chained to love and suffering. Instead, cut the ties of love and you will rejoice in your heart.” So he said in a loud voice.The Master is quite a fool.
He does not know: true it hurts to be tied with love, but it will hurt more to cut the ties of love, it will hurt more than even death.
In the tight binding of love’s bonds lies their unbinding.Thus great liberation is to be had in the bonds themselves.
My love, I was afraid the rope of your love might be weak so I doubled the strands of my love for you.”

Han Yong-un (1879–1944) Korean writer

"The Master’s Sermon", translated by Sammy Solberg

Love, Fools, Suffering, Heart

““I am pleading for my people, a poor downtrodden race
Who dwell in freedom’s boasted land with no abiding place
I am pleading that my people may have their rights restored,
For they have long been toiling, and yet had no reward
They are forced the crops to culture, but not for them they yield,
Although both late and early, they labor in the field.
While I bear upon my body, the scores of many a gash,
I’m pleading for my people who groan beneath the lash.
I’m pleading for the mothers who gaze in wild despair
Upon the hated auction block, and see their children there.
I feel for those in bondage—well may I feel for them.
I know how fiendish hearts can be that sell their fellow men.
Yet those oppressors steeped in guilt—I still would have them live;
For I have learned of Jesus, to suffer and forgive!
I want no carnal weapons, no machinery of death.
For I love to not hear the sound of war’s tempestuous breath.
I do not ask you to engage in death and bloody strife.
I do not dare insult my God by asking for their life.
But while your kindest sympathies to foreign lands do roam,
I ask you to remember your own oppressed at home.
I plead with you to sympathize with signs and groans and scars,
And note how base the tyranny beneath the stripes and stars.”

Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist

Olive Gilbert & Sojourner Truth (1878), Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Bondswoman of Olden Time, page 303.

Love, Life, Men, God

“Never be afraid to bring the transcendent mysteries of our faith, Christ's life and death and resurrection, to the help of the humblest and commonest of human wants.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 88.

Life, Faith, Help, Christ

“Another illustration. When for the first time I met Mister Clay, the other day in the cars, in front of us sat an old gentleman with an enormous wen upon his neck. Everybody would say the wen was a great evil, and would cause the man's death after a while. But you couldn't cut it out, for he'd bleed to death in a minute. But would you engraft the seeds of that wen on the necks of sound and healthy men? He must endure and be patient, hoping for possible relief. The wen represents slavery on the neck of this country. This only applies to those who think slavery is wrong. Those who think it right would consider the snake a jewel, and the wen an ornament.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Men, Hope, Cars, Thinking

“But the Queen has no such veto; She must sign her own death-warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it up to her.”

Walter Bagehot book The English Constitution

No. III, "The Monarchy (continued)", p. 58
The English Constitution (1867)

Housing

“Their shields are black, their bodies dyed. They choose dark nights for battle, and, by the dread and gloomy aspect of their death-like host, strike terror into the foe, who can never confront their strange and almost infernal appearance.”

Tacitus book Germania

Source: Germania (98), Chapter 43

Appearance, Night

“The death of Che Guevara places a responsibility on all revolutionaries of the World to redouble their decision to fight on to the final defeat of Imperialism. That is why in essence Che Guevara is not dead, his ideas are with us.”

Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) American activist

in (1967), as quoted in Andrew Sinclair's Viva Che!: The Strange Death and Life of Che Guevara

World, Idea, Decision, Fight

“If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a "peace conference," you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and aeroplanes.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Speech "The Elections in St. Petersburg" (January 1913) http://marx2mao.com/Stalin/ESP13.html Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews

Peace

“The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.”

José Saramago book Death with Interruptions

Source: Death with Interruptions (2005), p. 172

Life, People, Dogs, Feeling

“Submit to Islam and be safe. Or agree to the payment of the Jizya (tax), and you and your people will be under our protection, else you will have only yourself to blame for the consequences, for I bring the men who desire death as ardently as you desire life.”

Khalid ibn al-Walid (592–642) companion of the Islamic prophet Muhammad

This letter was written by Khalid, from his head-quarters in Babylonia, to the Persian monarch Emperor Yazdegerd III before invading it. (History of the World, Volume IV [Book XII. The Mohammedan Ascendency], page 463, by John Clark Ridpath, LL.D. 1910.

Life, Men, People

“Of all the characters I've played, I think I have more in common with that guy than with Reilly: Ace of Spies", referring to Carl Fitzgerald in Death in Brunswick.”

Sam Neill (1947) Irish-born New Zealand actor

Who Weekly (New Zealand); 23 August 1993

Guy, Thinking

“The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Philosophy of Composition

"The Philosophy of Composition" (published 1846).

World, Beauty, Lovers

“Again, in regard to actual human existence, I have found myself giving honour to those who feel its tragedy, who think truly about Death, who are oppressed by ignoble things even when they are inevitable; yet these qualities appear to me to militate against happiness, not only to the possessors, but to all whom they affect. And, generally, the best life seems to me one which thinks truly and feels greatly about human things, and which, in addition, contemplates the world of beauty and of abstract truths. This last is, perhaps, my most anti-utilitarian opinion: I hold all knowledge that is concerned with things that actually exist – all that is commonly called Science – to be of very slight value compared to the knowledge which, like philosophy and mathematics, is concerned with ideal and eternal objects, and is freed from this miserable world which God has made.
[Utilitarians] have been strangely anxious to prove that the life of the pig is not happier than that of the philosopher – a most dubious proposition…”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902
1900s

Life, God, Truth, World

“Song, if you find a man at peace with love,
say: 'Die while you're happy,
since early death is no grief, but a refuge:
and he who can die well, should not delay.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Canzon, s'uom trovi in suo amor viver queto, di': Muor' mentre se' lieto, ché morte al tempo è non duol, ma refugio; et chi ben pò morir, non cerchi indugio. Canzone 331, st. 6 ( tr. A. S. Kline http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=331) Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death

Love, Peace, Happiness

“Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave.”

Joseph Hall (1574–1656) British bishop

Epistles, Decade III, epistle 2. Compare: "And cradles rock us nearer to the tomb./Our birth is nothing but our death begun", Edward Young, Night Thoughts, night v., line 718.

Birth

“Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.”

Edgar Allan Poe The City in the Sea

St. 1.
The City in the Sea (1831)

Lying

“Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Letter to W. von Hulewicz

Life

“Two armies at death-grips — that is one great army committing suicide.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Variant translation: Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.
Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

Suicide

“Between the first and second Passover John and Christ baptized together, till the imprisonment of John, which was four months before the second. Then Christ began to preach, and call his disciples; and after he had instructed them a year, lent them to preach in the cities of the Jews: at the same time John hearing of the fame of Christ, sent to him to know who he was. At the third, the chief Priests began to consult about the death of Christ. A little before the fourth, the twelve after they had preached a year in all the cities, returned to Christ; and at the same time Herod beheaded John in prison, after he had been in prison two years and a quarter: and thereupon Christ fled into the desert for fear of Herod. The fourth Christ went not up to Jerusalem for fear of the Jews, who at the Passover before had consulted his death, and because his time was not yet come. Thenceforward therefore till the feast of Tabernacles he walked in Galilee, and that secretly for fear of Herod: and after the feast of Tabernacles he returned no more into Galilee, but sometimes was at Jerusalem, and sometimes retired beyond Jordan, or to the city Ephraim by the wilderness, till the Passover in which he was betrayed, apprehended, and crucified.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Vol. I, Ch. 11: Of the Times of the Birth and Passion of Christ
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)

Fear, Time, Christ

“But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Mais qu’un marchand de chameaux excite une sédition dans sa bourgade; qu’associé à quelques malheureux coracites il leur persuade qu’il s’entretient avec l’ange Gabriel; qu’il se vante d’avoir été ravi au ciel, et d’y avoir reçu une partie de ce livre inintelligible qui fait frémir le sens commun à chaque page; que, pour faire respecter ce livre, il porte dans sa patrie le fer et la flamme; qu’il égorge les pères, qu’il ravisse les filles, qu’il donne aux vaincus le choix de sa religion ou de la mort, c’est assurément ce que nul homme ne peut excuser, à moins qu’il ne soit né Turc, et que la superstition n’étouffe en lui toute lumière naturelle.
Referring to Muhammad, in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia (December 1740), published in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Vol. 7 (1869), edited by Georges Avenel, p. 105
Citas

Books, Religion, Angels, Nature

“Great joys, why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

Life, Sadness, Feeling, Loss

“For I say this is death and the sole death,—
When a man's loss comes to him from his gain,
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance,
And lack of love from love made manifest.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

A Death in the Desert (1864)

Love, Knowledge, Light, Loss

“That it must have been hunger alone, which first drove man to slay the animals and feed upon their flesh and blood; and that this compulsion was no mere consequence of his removal into colder climes … is proved by the patent fact that great nations with ample supplies of grain suffer nothing in strength or endurance even in colder regions through an almost exclusively vegetable diet, as is shewn by the eminent length of life of Russian peasants; while the Japanese, who know no other food than vegetables, are further renowned for their warlike valour and keenness of intellect. We may therefore call it quite an abnormality when hunger bred the thirst for blood … that thirst which history teaches us can never more be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage. One can only account for it all by the human beast of prey having made itself monarch of the peaceful world, just as the ravening wild beast usurped dominion of the woods … And little as the savage animals have prospered, we see the sovereign human beast of prey decaying too. Owing to a nutriment against his nature, he falls sick with maladies that claim but him, attains no more his natural span of life or gentle death, but, plagued by pains and cares of body and soul unknown to any other species, he shuffles through an empty life to its ever fearful cutting short.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Part III
Religion and Art (1880)

Life, Hunger, Pain, World

“A few weeks before his death, he asked another Columbia philosopher, David Albert, about God. "Why is God making me suffer so much?" he asked. "Just because I don't believe in him?"”

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) American philosopher

he asked. "Just because I don't believe in him?" The Independent, The Independent, Professor Sidney Morgenbesser: Philosopher celebrated for his withering New York Jewish humour http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-sidney-morgenbesser-550224.html, 6 August 2004. The Times, Sidney Morgenbesser: Erudite and influential American linguistic philosopher with the analytical acuity of Spinoza and the blunt wit of Groucho Marx https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sidney-morgenbesser-5cz8gg8qfvm (September 8, 2004). Obituaries – Sidney Morgenbesser, 82, Kibitzing Philosopher, Dies http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/obituaries/04morgenbesser.html. The New York Times (September 8, 2004).

God, Suffering

“Now, those who were killed and injured here were gunned down by a single killer with a powerful assault weapon. The motives of this killer may have been different than the mass shooters in Aurora or Newtown. But the instruments of death were so similar. And now another 49 innocent people are dead; another 53 are injured; some are still fighting for their lives; some will have wounds that will last a lifetime. We can’t anticipate or catch every single deranged person that may wish to do harm to his neighbors or his friends or his coworkers or strangers. But we can do something about the amount of damage that they do. Unfortunately, our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist or just a disturbed individual like those in Aurora and Newtown to buy extraordinarily powerful weapons, and they can do so legally.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

In Orlando after the Orlando nightclub shooting ([President Obama: Orlando Families' Grief Is 'Beyond Description', Time, Maya, Rhodan, June 16, 2016, September 2, 2018, http://time.com/4372190/orlando-shooting-barack-obama-joe-biden-grief/]; [‘Our hearts are broken, too’: Obama visits survivors of Orlando rampage, Katie, Zezima, Ellen, Nakashima, Mark, Berman, June 16, 2016, September 2, 2018, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/06/16/obama-looks-toward-grieving-orlando-in-visit-as-political-showdowns-expand-after-massacre/]; [After meeting with Orlando victims, Obama renews call for gun control, Gregory, Korte, USA Today, June 16, 2016, September 6, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/06/16/obama-biden-visit-orlando-emotional-visit-after-shooting/85973066/]).
2016, After the Orlando nightclub shooting (June 2016)

People, Motivation, Fight, Personality

“I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful. I didn't 'fall out in church' as they say, but there was a very strong awakening in me of the importance of these issues in my life. I didn't want to walk alone on this journey. Accepting Jesus Christ in my life has been a powerful guide for my conduct and my values and my ideals..”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

"Q & A : Barack Obama" http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/januaryweb-only/104-32.0.html?start=1 Interview in Christianity Today (22 January 2008) 2008

Life, Faith, Strong, Christ

“I don’t fear death. I remember my last meeting with my father when he told me, "You know, tonight when I will be killed, my mother and my father will be waiting for me." It makes me weepy … but I don’t think it can happen unless God wants it to happen because so many people have tried to kill me.”

Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan

Destiny’s daughter (2007)

God, People, Fear, Thinking

“Ambition is the death of thought.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 77e

“I have had close relations with Dattopantji for the last 50 years. If one has to explain the personality of Dattopantji in one sentence, we can say that he was a dedicated Rashtrasevak. He lived his whole life as a karmayogi. The work he took up he aimed it out with full responsibility. He established a wide network of friends without compromising on his views and ideology. His thinking was not confined to labourers or economic issues alone it involved the entire life of the nation and the world. His death is a personal loss to me. A strong pillar of our work is no more.”

Dattopant Thengadi (1920–2004) Indian politician

L.K. Advani, The Organiser, 31 October 2004 issue. p. 13, Article Named- Dedicated Rashtrasevak https://web.archive.org/web/20120331123458/http://organiser.org/archives/historic/dynamic/modulesa3a9.html?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=48&page=13

Life, World, Thinking, Strong

“A bloody and a sudden end,
Gunshot or a noose,
For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

John Kinsella’s Lament For Mrs. Mary Moore http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1520/', st. 1 Last Poems (1936-1939)

“Death may overwhelm them, but not fear; unconquerable they stand their ground, and their courage well-nigh outlives their lives.”
Mors obruit illos, non timor; invicti perstant animoque supersunt jam prope post animam.

Sidonius Apollinaris book Carmina

Mors obruit illos,
non timor; invicti perstant animoque supersunt
jam prope post animam.
Carmen 5, line 251; vol. 1 p. 83.
Carmina

Fear, Courage

“Let all partake of the feast of faith. Let all receive the riches of goodness. Let no one lament their poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let no one mourn their transgressions, for pardon has dawned from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Saviour's death has set us free.”

John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father

Paschal Homily

Fear, Faith, Universe

“The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

Love, Life, World, Smile

“"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

World, Happiness

“The power of the State may be brought to bear, as it often is in England, through public opinion rather than through the laws. By oratory and the influence of the Press, public opinion is largely created by the State, and a tyrannous public opinion is as great an enemy to liberty as tyrannous laws. If the young man who will not fight finds that he is dismissed from his employment, insulted in the streets, cold-shouldered by his friends, and thrown over with scorn by any woman who may formerly have liked him, he will feel the penalty quite as hard to bear as a death sentence. A free community requires not only legal freedom, but a tolerant public opinion, an absence of that instinctive inquisition into our neighbors' affairs which, under the guise of upholding a high moral standard, enables good people to indulge unconsciously a disposition to cruelty and persecution. Thinking ill of others is not in itself a good reason for thinking well of ourselves. But so long as this is not recognized, and so long as the State can manufacture public opinion, except in the rare cases where it is revolutionary, public opinion must be reckoned as a definite part of the power of the State.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Why Men Fight https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_Men_Fight (1917), pp. 48-50

People, Law, Penalty, Feeling

“Some sixty years ago, Pope Pius XII, in a memorable address to anaesthesiologists and intensive care specialists, stated that there is no obligation to have recourse in all circumstances to every possible remedy and that, in some specific cases, it is permissible to refrain from their use… The specific element of this criterion is that it considers “the result that can be expected, taking into account the state of the sick person and his or her physical and moral resources”. It thus makes possible a decision that is morally qualified as withdrawal of “overzealous treatment”.
Such a decision responsibly acknowledges the limitations of our mortality, once it becomes clear that opposition to it is futile. “Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2278). This difference of perspective restores humanity to the accompaniment of the dying, while not attempting to justify the suppression of the living. It is clear that not adopting, or else suspending, disproportionate measures, means avoiding overzealous treatment; from an ethical standpoint, it is completely different from euthanasia, which is always wrong, in that the intent of euthanasia is to end life and cause death.
The anguish associated with conditions that bring us to the threshold of human mortality, and the difficulty of the decision we have to make, may tempt us to step back from the patient. Yet this is where, more than anything else, we are called to show love and closeness, recognizing the limit that we all share and showing our solidarity.
Let each of us give love in his or her own way—as a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, a brother or sister, a doctor or a nurse. But give it!”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Message of His Holiness Pope Francis to the Participants in the European Regional Meeting of the World Medical Association, From the Vatican, 7 November 2017 https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-messages/2017/documents/papa-francesco_20171107_messaggio-monspaglia.html 2010s, 2017

Love, Life, Way, Decision

“There can be no doubt that the youth of today have to be protected against certain poisonous effects inherent in present-day civilization. Five social diseases surround them, even in early childhood. There is the decline in fitness due to modern methods of locomotion; the decline in initiative due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis; the decline in care and skill due to the weakened tradition of craftsmanship; the decline in self-discipline due to the ever-present availability of tranquilizers and stimulants, and the decline in compassion, which William Temple called "spiritual death."”

Kurt Hahn (1886–1974) German educator

Quoted by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Colorado Outward Bound's 25th anniversary in 1987; as cited in Leadership the Outward Bound Way (2007), ISBN 159485033X.

Youth, Disease, Childhood

“"The kids out there want something they can relate to, something that's real; most of that whiny stuff isn't real. The cheesy pop songs just bore me to death." (commenting on how he feels about rock and pop.)”

Jonathan Davis (1971) Heavy metal singer, frontman for Korn

Feeling

“Someone will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong — acting the part of a good man or a bad. …For wherever a man's place is, whether the place he has chosen or that where he has been placed by a commander. there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should not think of death or of anything, but of disgrace.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

28b–d
Plato, Apology

Life, Thinking, Chance, Parting

“That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, "Here's a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about."
And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it — have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Galápagos

Galápagos (1985)

People, Thinking, Time, Fight

“And when you see a man who is repining at the approach of death, is not his reluctance a sufficient proof that he is not a lover of wisdom, but a lover of the body, and probably at the same time a lover of either money or power, or both?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Wisdom, Money, Lovers, Time

“Very much screwed in the head by trying to get Roger's marriage chapter into shape; and also warmed by L. saying last night that he was fonder of me than I of him. A discussion as to which would mind the other's death most. He said he depended more upon our common life than I did. He gave the garden as an instance. He said I live more in a world of my own. I go for long walks alone. So we argued. I was very happy to think I was so much needed. Its strange how seldom one feels this: yet 'life in common' is an immense reality.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Friday 28 April, 1939
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Life, Marriage, World, Feeling

“But death blinds you, unaware of man’s fall –
An autumn that steals the flower from the flower peddler.Death is testimony of god’s love and mercy for man –
A promise made between autumn and spring.”

Ghani Khan (1914–1996) Pakistani poet

Death, st. 3-4

Love, God, Spring, Flowers

“One should be prepared to receive ninety-nine percent of an enemy's attack and stare death right in the face in order to illumine the Path.”

Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969) founder of aikido

The Art of Peace (1992)

“The true disciple of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is ever pursuing death and dying; and if this is true, why, having had the desire of death all his life long, should he repine at that which he has always been pursuing and desiring?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Life, Men

“I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind
That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind
All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved
Or boyish intellect approved,
With some appropriate commentary on each;
Until imagination brought
A fitter welcome; but a thought
Of that late death took all my heart for speech.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory, st. 12
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

Love, Imagination, Heart, Childhood

“It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It's really crazy, isn't it? We get to live, then we have to die. What we put into every moment is all we have… What spirit human beings have! It is a pretty cheesy deal—all the pleasures of life, and then death.”

Gilda Radner (1946–1989) American comedian

It's Always Something (1989), pg. 87 (2009 edition)

Life, Pleasure

“That dark dweller in Btaj
Is my only refuge.
O, my companion,
Worldly comfort is an illusion,
As soon as you get it, it goes
I have chosen the Indestructible for my refuge
Whom the snake of death
Will not devour.
My Beloved dwells in my heart,
I have actually seen that Abode of Joy.
Mir’s Lord is Hari, the Indestructible
My Lord, I have taken refuge with Thee
Thy slave.”

Meera Bai Hindu mystic poet

Mīrābāī, in Indian Religions: A Historical Reader of Spiritual Expression and Experience http://books.google.co.in/books?id=HTepAfJv_6YC&pg=PA351, p. 351 Variant: O my companion, worldly comfort is illusion, As soon you get it, it goes. I have chosen the indestructible for my refuge, Him whom the snake of death will not devour. My beloved dwells in my heart all day, I have actually seen that abode of joy. Meera's lord is Hari, the indestructible. My lord, I have taken refuge with you, your maidservant.

Heart, Joy

“In vain do they think themselves innocent who appropriate to their own use alone those goods which God gave in common; by not giving to others that which they themselves receive, they become homicides and murderers, inasmuch as in keeping for themselves those things which would alleviate the sufferings of the poor, we may say that every day they cause the death of as many persons as they might have fed and did not. When, therefore, we offer the means of living to the indigent, we do not give them anything of ours, but that which of right belongs to them. It is less a work of mercy which we perform than the payment of a debt.”

Pope Gregory I (540–604) Pope from 590 to 604

quoted in George D. Herron, Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), pp. 111-112.

God, Thinking, Suffering, Personality

“"When a man lies, he murders some part of the world. These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives.", (Paul Gerhardt, 1607-1676). "All this I cannot bear to witness any longer. Cannot the Kingdom of Salvation take me home?", (Burton).”

Cliff Burton (1962–1986) American musician, member of Metallica

Lyrics for "To Live Is to Die" on the album "...And Justice for All" (Which is said to be the last song he wrote with James Hetfield, before his death in 1986.)
Says this in the song: To Live Is To Die

Men, World, Home, Parting

“The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

Fate, Time

“I'd like to imagine I won't end up in hell, but I think I've done too much acid and listened to too much death metal to sit on a cloud next to God with angels floating above my head.”

Dave Grohl (1969) American rock musician, multi-instrumentalist, and singer-songwriter

Maxim Magazine (January 2008)

God, Angels, Imagination, Hell

“A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this — that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made, not to understand, but to feel, as crime.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

Men, Religion, Feeling, Understanding

“Death is only a step towards …/ In this celebration of love/ Death is a stepping stone/ Towards the fullness/ Towards which all of us/ Consciously and unconsciously long for.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Death: Live It! p. 92.
Death: Live It! (2005)

Love

“Why have the majority of overseas Internet companies failed? Google fails, Yahoo failed, eBay and the like were all squashed to death by the locals? Is it because none are able to succeed in China? For every loser, excuses are abound, humans always try to search for excuses to justify failing, and tend not to search for direction towards success.”

Jack Ma (1964) Chinese businessman

马云调侃谷歌退出：中国将制定未来游戏规则 http://china.ibtimes.com/articles/20100120/-2014431602.htm

Search, Success

“James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

From a note Twain wrote in London on May 31, 1897 to reporter Frank Marshall White: Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out For the Territory : Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 134 http://books.google.com/books?id=ms3tce7BgJsC&lpg=PA134&vq=%22the%20report%20of%20my%20death%20was%20an%20exaggeration%22&pg=PA134. (The original note is the Papers of Mark Twain, Accession #6314, etc., Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va. http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=uva-sc/viu00005.xml, in Box 1.) White subsequently reported this in "Mark Twain Amused," New York Journal, 2 June 1897. White also recounts the incident in "Mark Twain as a Newspaper Reporter," The Outlook, Vol. 96, 24 December 1910 "Chapters from My Autobiography", The North American Review, 21 September 1906, p. 160. Mark Twain Misquote: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. This paraphrase or misquote may be more popular than the original. Variant: I said - 'Say the report is greatly exaggerated'.

“This hunger for novelty — which makes sensuous love equally changeful and rapacious, which makes us seek the same emotion in other bodies which we cast off as fast as they fall — turns life into an infernal succession of disenchantments, spites and scorn; and it is chiefly that hunger for novelty which leaves us a prey to unrealizable hope and irrevocable regret. Those lovers who persist in remaining together execute themselves; the name of their common death, which at first was Absence, becomes Presence.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Love, Life, Hunger, Hope

“Labour therefore diligently, that not only out of the time of temptation, but also in the time and conflict of death, when thy conscience is thoroughly afraid with the remembrance of thy sins past, and the devil assaileth thee with great violence, going about to overwhelm thee with heaps, floods and whole seas of sins, to terrify thee, to draw thee from Christ, and to drive thee to despair; that then I say, thou mayest be able to say with sure confidence: Christ the Son of God was given, not for the righteous and holy, but for the unrighteous and sinners…. If he gave himself to death for our sins, then undoubtedly he is no tyrant or judge which will condemn us for our sins. He is no caster-down of the afflicted, but a raiser-up of those that are fallen, a merciful reliever and comforter of the heavy and broken-hearted. Else should Paul lie in saying: "which gave himself for our sins."”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

A Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (1535. Translation revised 1953 by Philip S Watson. On Galatians 1:4.)

God, Lie, Confidence, Affliction

“The meaning of this story is not found in the drowning of the Egyptian soldiers, for no one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being. Rather, this story symbolizes the death of evil and of inhuman oppression and unjust exploitation.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. book Strength to Love

Strength to Love, p. 73
1960s, Strength to Love (1963)

Evil

“Is there life before death? — that is the question!”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Irrelevance
One Minute Wisdom (1989)

Life, Question

“Fun seems to be a three-letter word these days, although with directors like Tim Burton and George Lucas, it's fun, fun, fun while working yourself to death. But if you compare those Hammer movies to what has been made in the last 20 years - Brian de Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Wes Craven, Tim Burton and Peter Jackson have all said the same thing to me: 'We were brought up on your movies.”

Christopher Lee (1922–2015) British actor and singer

And it certainly shows in theirs. Work hard - and play plenty of golf https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/feb/24/books.guardianreview (February 23, 2001)

“If
I'd ever grown prosperous like Shah Jahan was,
I'd not have waited for my beloved's death
before I erected a Taj Mahal.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

The Tajmahal and my Love http://www.best-poems.net/love_poems/the_taj_mahal_amp_my_love.html/ From Poetry

Waiting

“I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

5 April 1944
(1942 - 1944)

God

“Her majesty, being now in possession of her imperial crown and estate pertaining to it, cannot forsake that faith that the whole world knows her to have followed and practiced since her birth; she desires, rather, by God's grace, to preserve it till her death; and she desires greatly that her subjects may come to embrace the same faith quietly and with charity, whereby she shall receive great happiness.”

Mary I of England (1516–1558) Queen of England and Ireland

Proclamation concerning Religion (1553-08-18).

God, World, Faith, Birth

“In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

“O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Life, Art, Sleep, Perfection

“Care-Charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my languish, and restore the light;
With dark forgetting of my care return.
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill adventured youth”

Samuel Daniel (1562–1619) Poet and historian

Delia http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/delia45.htm (1592), Sonnet XLV.

Youth, Sleep, Light, Time

“Citizens, by what illusion could one persuade himself that you are inhuman. Your Revolutionary Tribunal has condemned three hundred rascals to death in a year. Has not the Spanish Inquisition done worse than that … Have the English assizes butchered no one in that period? … What of the kings of Europe, does anyone prate to them of pity? Ah, do not allow yourselves to grow soft-hearted!”

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–1794) military and political leader

Speech to the National Convention (February 26, 1794). [Source: Charles Vellay (ed.), Oeuvres Complètes de Saint-Just, Vol. 2 (2 vols., Paris, 1908), pp. 236-237]

Heart

“When the self-congratulatory part of the evening is over, maybe we could get back to saving my best friend from being exsanguinated to death?”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Clary to Jace, pg. 253
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Parting

“This Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Nobel Lecture (1998)

Feeling, Tree, Cry

“I'd have played against him (Len Bias) for the next 14 years. I would have been in my prime and he would have been in his. I'll never forget what he looked like. He was a 'Wow!' player. When Maryland played and was on television, I watched. It was like, 'I need to watch this guy; I'll be seeing him real soon.'… It was just shocking. Thing is, cocaine was huge then. My brother had been in and out of rehab a few times…. It was a popular drug at the time. And guys I was playing against, like John Lucas and Michael Ray Richardson and John Drew had done cocaine. I was thinking: 'What the hell is up with this cocaine? I should try this once to see what it was all about.' Then, we heard the reports were that Bias only used it once… that it was his first time. When I heard that, it scared me to death… scared the daylights out of me. It scared me into not trying it even once, not going anywhere near it.”

Charles Barkley (1963) American basketball player

Asked to comment on the 20th anniversary of the cocaine-overdose death of Len Bias,

Guy, Hell, Thinking, Time

“Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”

Saul Bellow book Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 265
General sources

“Let there be no fainting of heart and no depression, and also let there be no unforeseeing fury, no blindly-striking madness. We are at the beginning of a time of terrible trial. The passage is not to be easy, the crown is not to be cheaply earned. India is going down into the valley of the shadow of death, into a great horror of darkness and suffering. Let us realise that what we are now suffering, is a small part of what we shall have to suffer, and work in that knowledge, with resolution, without hysteria…. The first need at the present moment is courage, a courage which knows not how to flinch or shrink.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Bande Mataram, 1907
India's Rebirth

Courage, Knowledge, Suffering, Time

“That I, a funny little gesticulating animal on two legs, should stand beneath the stars and declaim in a passion about my rights – it seems so laughable, so out of all proportion. Much better, like Archimedes, to be killed because of absorption in eternal things…
There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the "intellectual love of God." Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Miss Rinder, July 30, 1918
1910s

Love, God, War, Smile

“But you will soon pay for it, my friend, when you take off your clothes, and with distended stomach carry your peacock into the bath undigested! Hence a sudden death, and an intestate old age; the new and merry tale runs the round of every dinner-table, and the corpse is carried forth to burial amid the cheers of enraged friends!”
Poena tamen praesens, cum tu deponis amictus turgidus et crudum pavonem in balnea portas. hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senectus; it nova nec tristis per cunctas fabula cenas: ducitur iratis plaudendum funus amicis.

Juvenal book Satires

Poena tamen praesens, cum tu deponis amictus
turgidus et crudum pavonem in balnea portas.
hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senectus;
it nova nec tristis per cunctas fabula cenas:
ducitur iratis plaudendum funus amicis.
I, line 142.
Satires, Satire I

Age, Clothes

“When this country here was first being founded there were 13 colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation, so some of them stood up and said “Liberty or death.” Though I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan, the white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot, and George Washington -- wasn’t nothing nonviolent about old Pat or George Washington. “Liberty or death” was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful when the sun would never set on them. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little, scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire “Liberty or death.” And here you have 22 million Afro-American black people today catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I’m here to tell you, in case you don’t know it, that you got a new generation of black people in this country who don’t care anything whatsoever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds. No. This is a new generation. If they’re gonna draft these young black men and send them over to Korea or South Vietnam to face 800 million Chinese — if you’re not afraid of those odds, you shouldn’t be afraid of these odds.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)

Men, People, Books, School

“During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch—the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. … There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Bible Teaching and Religious Practice http://books.google.com/books?id=sujuHO_fvJgC&pg=PA568&dq=twain+%22Bible+Teaching+and+Religious+Practice%22&cd=1#v=onepage&q=twain%20%22Bible%20Teaching%20and%20Religious%20Practice%22&f=false. "Bible Teaching and Religious Practice" (1923)

Books, Age, World, Law