“What then remains but that we still should cry
Not to be born, or, being born, to die?”
The World (1629)
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Francis Bacon 295
English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and auth… 1561–1626Related quotes
Théâtre des ris et des pleurs
Lit! où je nais, et où je meurs,
Tu nous fais voir comment voisins
Sont nos plaisirs et chagrins.
Translated by Samuel Johnson, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“We are born for love, but it will die if not nurtured.”
A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)
“I don't want to die!"
"Then you should never been born.”
Source: Black Blood
“As we are born we die, and the end commences with the beginning.”
Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet.
Book IV, line 16. Quoted by Michel de Montaigne in Essays (1580), Book I, Chapter 19.
Variant translation: When we are born we die, our end is but the pendant of our beginning.
Astronomica
“We are born, we live, and we die in the midst of the marvelous.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Context: What are we? What is the future? What is the past? What magic fluid envelops us and hides from us the things it is most important for us to know? We are born, we live, and we die in the midst of the marvelous.
“We weep when we are born, not when we die!”
Source: "The Metempsychosis", The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882), p. 139