“Strange, that ignorance should be our best happiness in this life, and yet be the one we are ever striving to destroy!”
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)
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Letitia Elizabeth Landon 785
English poet and novelist 1802–1838Related quotes

“Let us strive then, while Life is ours, to secure that Death may find we have left little or nothing he can destroy.”
Proinde, dum suppetit vita, enitamur ut mors quam paucissima quae abolere possit inveniat.
Letter 5, 8.
Letters, Book V


What the Bee Knows : Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story (1989)
Context: The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the stone temples are, all of them, ultimately, as flimsy as London Bridge; our cities but tents set up in the cosmos. We pass. But what the bee knows, the wisdom that sustains our passing life — however much we deny or ignore it — that for ever remains.

2005-09, Address at Stanford University (2005)
Context: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

“It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse.”
Quotes, The Assault on Reason (2007)
Context: It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.