“Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.”
Variant: Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.
Source: The Book Thief
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Markus Zusak 214
Australian author 1975Related quotes
“Hope is the only good that is common to all men; those who have nothing else possess hope still.”
A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 234
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6; variant translation: I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts! For therein, and in nothing else, lies goodness and love of humankind.
Address in Des Moines, Iowa (4 November 1910)
1910s
On life in hiding from Nazi authorities, p. 48
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Context: One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking. I wouldn't say that I particularly matured. The thinking was physics thinking. I was just short of twenty-two then.
I was in hiding for two years and two months, something like that. In all that time I went out very, very little, just once in a great while, after dark. Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.
Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter IX, Section 81, p. 540
"Ask Me Anything" thread on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/aunv58/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/eh9gsvg (25 February 2019)
2000s