“So it would seem to be true:
when cruel birth debases, we forget.
When cruel death debases,
we believe it erases all the rest
that precedes.
But stand brave, life-liver,
bleeding out your days
in the river of time.
Stand brave:
time moves both ways”
Divers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_(Joanna_Newsom_album) (2015)
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Joanna Newsom 61
American musician 1982Related quotes

“As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow.”
Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
Aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Book I, ode xi, line 7
John Conington's translation:
:In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebbed away,
Seize the present, trust tomorrow e'en as little as you may.
Odes (c. 23 BC and 13 BC)

To Leon Goldensohn, February 28, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Maia Roberts and Malcolm Fade, pg. 404
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)
Context: We don't have a mouse problem,' said Maia. 'We have a megalomaniac problem.' She looked at Catarina. 'Sebastian's determined to drive wedges between Downworlders and Shadowhunters. Kidnapping the representatives, attacking the Praetor, he won't stop there. All of Downworld will know soon enough what's going on. The question is, where will they stand?'
'We will stand bravely with you!' Malcolm announced. Catarina looked darkly at him, and he quailed. 'Well, we will stand bravely near you. Or at least within earshot.

“Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all!
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.”
The Liberty Song (1768).

“Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.”
"A Time for Moral Courage", Reader’s Digest (July 1964)
Variant: Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.