Thoughts and reflections on death, ideas and meditations of various great authors and famous people on the subject that most of all conditions our existences.
Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know… He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience… What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T.S. Eliot
It is said that mourning, with its gradual work, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe it; because for me time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not cry), that’s all. For the rest everything has remained still. Because what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.
Roland Barthes
Abandon yourself to the Mother, descend into the great and beneficent earth, soft virgin for the pious: may it protect you from the gnawing of corruption. Open yourself earth without hurting him, welcome him benignly and with a sweet greeting. Wrap him earth as the mother wraps her son in her robe.
Rigveda, Indian text
War is a rather barbaric mechanism of reorganization. It is caused by the ignorance of the species, and could be avoided if only the latter were to educate themselves more, but evidently man, being extremely selfish in his masochism, prefers to enjoy the terrible spectacle of death and suffering, rather than spend more energy to evolve culturally.
Carl William Brown
In De civitate Dei book XIII, Augustine argues that bodily death is always a bad thing in itself. Careful consideration of the story of the fall from Eden shows it to be the very opposite of the Platonic fall myth. The Eden story sees the union of body and soul as natural and the separation as a punishment. The Platonic fall sees the separation of the soul as natural and the union with the body as a punishment. Augustine’s approach to death is thus in sharp contrast to that of Ambrose.
David Albert Jones
A man’s death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.
John Berger
I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.
John Donne
Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.
Coleman Dowell
Must the joy of resurrection require the kiss of death? It seems so. How could you return from death without first having died? We can hardly deny the myriad ways that “greater sorrow issues in greater joy”: a costlier war sweetens the emperor’s victory, graver peril brightens the glory of a sailor’s deft escape, sharper hunger deepens bread’s satiation, and the prodigality of the son’s dissipation renders more comely his bitter remorse. Yet joy is ontologically prior to all sorrow, for God enjoys Godself eternally. And insisting upon death as the precondition for life is as obscene as desiring another’s misery as precondition for mercy. Death is revolting. But it seems necessary or natural, even.
Jordan Daniel Wood
The deceased can experience what is in his spiritual surroundings only to the extent that he has already thought about the spiritual world here on earth. Many people today say that they do not need to worry about life after death, that they can wait: “When we are dead we will see what is after death.” But this is an impossible thought. You simply cannot see anything after death if you have not thought about the spiritual world here in life, if you have only lived there materialistically.
Rudolf Steiner
By calling death an “illustrious ancestor,” Carl William Brown may be alluding to the essential role of death in shaping life itself. Just as an ancestor is a predecessor to our existence, death has been an inevitable presence since the dawn of humanity, affecting every living thing. This may also allude to how mortality has inspired philosophical, scientific, and artistic pursuits, giving death a kind of grandeur or influence in shaping human progress.
ChatGPT
Karol Woityla once said: “There is no hope without fear and fear without hope; then, approaching death, he reiterated: “Do not be afraid.” Well, apart from the fact that the Pope is also a man like all the others, he should at least cultivate a little more coherence, in fact hope is one of the three theological virtues preached by the church, or am I wrong!
Carl William Brown
Ignore death until the last moment; then, when it can no longer be ignored, get injected with morphine and go away in a coma. Totally reasonable, humane and scientific, eh?
Aldous Huxley
The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water. It flows down, clean and cool, from the heights of Herman and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon. the Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it, the Sea of Galilee has an outlet. It gets to give. It gathers in its riches that it may pour them out again to fertilize the Jordan plain. But the Dead Sea with the same water makes horror. For the Dead Sea has no outlet. It gets to keep.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Death is not evil, because it frees man from all evils, and together with the good, it takes away his desires. Old age is the greatest evil, because it deprives man of all pleasures, leaving him only his appetites; and it brings with it all pains. Nevertheless, men fear death, and desire old age.
Giacomo Leopardi
Death, or its allusion, makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their ghostly condition; every act they perform can be their last; there is no face that is not on the verge of being erased like the face of a dream. Everything, among mortals, has the value of the irretrievable and the casual.
J.L. Borges
One’s own death is unrepresentable, and every time we try to do so, we can see that in reality we continue to be present as spectators. Therefore the psychoanalytic school has also been able to affirm that there is no one who fundamentally believes in his own death, or, what is equivalent, that in his unconscious each of us is convinced of his own immortality.
Sigmund Freud
Humor is born to contrast power and pain, as well as death. That is why it is positioned as an antagonist both of power itself and of religion, which have practically the same goals. The only difference is that humor is more democratic, more inoffensive and more artistic, at least in its initial phase, because even the most sublime humor can become very cruel and merciless in the long run.
Carl William Brown
To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?
Socrates
The deep sorrow at the death of every beloved being arises from the feeling that in every individual there is something inexpressible, exclusively peculiar and therefore absolutely unrepeatable. “Omne individuum ineffabile.” This is also true of animals, and is felt most keenly by someone who has accidentally mortally wounded a beloved animal, and now catches its farewell look, which causes him excruciating pain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I really hope that when I die someone has enough sense to throw me in the river or something. Anything short of putting me in a goddamn cemetery. People coming and putting flowers on your stomach on Sundays and all that crap. Who wants flowers when they’re dead? No one.
Salinger
On July 15, 1997 in America a hypothetical serial killer killed a great fashion artist, Gianni Versace; the famous stylist loved to provoke and art must be provocation, perhaps this is also why literature does not disdain serial killers in a certain way. And then Leopardi had already compared fashion to death, strange correlations, no?
Carl William Brown
Death’s ambiguity surfaces variously across the Confessions. Recall the two explicit death narratives, that of Augustine’s unnamed friend and that of his mother Monica. In the former we read of death “the hideous enemy”; in the latter Monica speaks fondly of “the good of death.” Early on Augustine calls this earthly existence both “a deathly life” (vitam mortalem) and “a life-giving death” (mortem vitalem), in the same sentence. Can we affirm them both at once? The Confessions contains profound reflection on just that question. Though two have been commented often enough, Augustine really describes four separate deaths within these pages: the death of a friend (Book IV), the death of Christ (Book VII), the death of Augustine (Book VIII), and the death of Monica (IX). Together these facets form a prism through which one might glimpse the unseen spectrum of divine providence. These four vignettes present, I mean, a retrospective contemplation of Augustine’s gradual perception that and why death must remain forever ambivalent to Christians.
Jordan Daniel Wood
The spiritual threads woven between the souls of the deceased and ourselves are not broken by death, they continue to exist, indeed they become much deeper after death than they were here. What I have said must be accepted as a solemn truth, full of meaning.
Rudolf Steiner
The three great mother deities of the Eastern peoples seem to have been generators and annihilators at the same time; goddesses of life and fertility at the same time as goddesses of death.
Sigmund Freud
Giving death gives a titanic feeling. It is a greatly heroic act. It causes a therapeutic, cathartic effect. I have known many murderers, I have never found a repentant one. The last one I met, in prison, had just killed his wife and told me: “Now I am cured.”
Vittorio Andreoli
Death overthrows everything that is near, and when one is overcome by pain, it says smilingly: You are not at all as helpless as you imagine, you can overthrow yourself, and your pain with you. Death prepares for man the pains from which it itself can then free.
Elias Canetti
Death is nothing. I am only in the next room. What we were before for each other we are still. Speak to me in the same way, do not look solemn or sad. Keep laughing at what made us laugh. Pray, smile, think of me. I am not far away. Dry your tears and do not cry, if you love me: your smile is my peace.
Henry Scott Holland
Rebellion is death and rebirth at the same time, it is an acceptance of the fear of defeat that can only give greater strength to existence, it is a courageous act of protest that claims the right to the full realization of one’s interiority, it is the source of every myth, of every religion, of every mystery, of every social conquest and of every progressive utopia.
Carl William Brown
Those who have lived a good life do not fear death, but meet it calmly, and even long for it in the face of great suffering. But those who do not have a peaceful conscience, dread death as though life means nothing but physical torment. The challenge is to live our life so that we will be prepared for death when it comes.
Author Unknown
Death of New Creation: Monica (Book IX). Augustine’s mother, Monica, died soon after his baptism. Born anew, his response differs dramatically from that after his friend’s death. But here again the response proves complex. He does not simply embrace the triumphalist response to death, which Monica herself seemed to express. She speaks of “contempt for this life and the good of death [bono mortis],” a markedly Ambrosian sentiment. Augustine initially tries to adopt this attitude, several times restraining tears and spurning as childish the grief expressed by those tears. He even begins to wax philosophical on matters pertinent to death, all the while suffering deep inner agony. He cannot make sense of this agony. Had he not learned from his friend’s death that death is “bound to occur”?
Jordan Daniel Wood
O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hath cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!
Sir Walter Raleigh
Dragged into the hospital labyrinth, more reassuring for his family than for him, the dying person is continually denied his specificity and the difference between dying and being ill is methodically hidden. The important thing is to hide the arrival of nothingness under therapeutic obstinacy, to silence the appearance of dying with a pile of uncertain diagnoses; in short, to mask the imminence of the end through a blind resuscitation technique that sometimes transforms the dying person into a living corpse. The desire for denial is so strong that it ends up forcibly taking away from the dying person one of the most natural rights there is: the right to die.
J. Urbain
Whatever anyone may say, death is what nature has found best to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything ceases forever! What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the slightest effort on our part we dispose of the universe, we drag it into our disappearance. Definitely, dying is immoral…
Emil Cioran
Seeking the ideal sometimes means having to destroy the stupid obstacles of reality. So for art even a simple murderer, if he contributes to re-establishing the concept of equality, and in death we are all equal, is nothing but an honest intellectual.
Carl William Brown
A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror.
George Gurdjieff
We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
Marcel Proust
If you are aware of death, it will not come as a surprise, you will not be worried about it. You will feel that death is exactly like changing clothes and, consequently, at that moment you will be able to maintain peace of mind.
Tenzin Gyatso (Dalai Lama)
Do not despise death, but accept it willingly, as one of the things willed by nature, like becoming young and growing old, growing up, maturing, growing teeth and beards and growing gray, begetting children, carrying them at the breast, bringing them to the light, and all the other natural actions that accompany the various periods of life. Such is also dissolution.
Marco Aurelio
Whatever this life of ours may be, it cannot take away from us death, the superhuman, transcendent death. Oh, let us cease to inquire into it, into what it is and what it is not! Knowledge is the privilege of human beings, and in death we shall know nothing more, we shall no longer be part of humanity, and the joy that comes to us from this thought compensates us for the bitterness of knowledge, for the sordidness of our being human.
D. H. Lawrence
Considering the problems of overpopulation, violence against women, children and the weakest and most defenseless people, and also considering the pernicious spread of stupidity and the absurd costs of injustice and false temple law, I would be in favor of reintroducing the death penalty for all those serious cases that deserve it. Or better said, a penalty of expulsion to a better world, so that one can pass on to a better life, for oneself and for others.
Carl William Brown
Belief in hell and the knowledge that all ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented most human beings from behaving as if death were nothing more than an unfounded rumor.
Aldous Huxley
There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle “promise” from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.
Ezra Pound
When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Death is the providence of those who have had the taste and the gift of failing, it is the reward of all those who have not had success, who did not care to have it… It proves them right, it is their triumph. Instead, for the others, for those who have struggled to have success, and have had me, what a denial, what a slap in the face!
Emil Cioran
We live in a civilization that has stopped living with death and this is because there has been a regression of the sacred, the religious and the ritual, which has caused death to become more and more something private and unspeakable. The great rites of healing and exorcism of death can no longer function in our society.
E. Morin
The theme of death in life and life in death is fundamental for the artist. The poet in fact becomes a seer and through the confusion of the senses communicates with the afterlife where he draws his inspiration. He is therefore a medium between the ideal and the real, his destiny in fact is to become a cursed and enthusiastic demiurge increasingly unhappy precisely because he is always searching for a non-illusory happiness. In this his stupidity is similar to that of the lover, the madman, the wise man and the philosopher.
Carl William Brown
If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
Muriel Spark
At the moment of death there will appear to you, swifter than lightning, the luminous splendor of the colorless light of emptiness, and that will surround you on all sides. Terrified, you will flee from the radiance. Try to submerge it is an obstacle blocking the path of liberation. yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self, all attachment to your illusory ego. Recognize that the boundless light of this true reality is your own true self, and you shall be saved!
Tibetan
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born – a hundred million years — and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
Mark Twain
As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction is so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense with it from this moment onward the idea of annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real what we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finish, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter. According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.
Marquis De Sade
When I was a boy it was a choral event. A neighbor died and everyone attended, helped. Death was shown. The house was opened, the dead person was exposed and everyone thus made their acquaintance with death. Today it is the opposite: death is an embarrassment, it is hidden. No one knows how to handle it anymore. No one knows what to do with a dead person anymore. The experience of death is becoming increasingly rare and one can arrive at one’s own without ever having seen that of another.
Tiziano Terzani
Fear no more the violence of the sun, / nor the wrath of furious winter; / you have completed your earthly labor / you have returned home, you have collected your pay; / handsome youths and blond girls / like chimney sweepers must be reduced to dust. / Fear no more the arrogance of the great, / you have escaped the blows of the tyrant, / no longer care for food and clothing; / for you a rush or an oak are the same thing: / the sceptre, science and medicine, everything must follow this game and be reduced to dust.
William Shakespeare
In human existence […] Life and Death face each other and the clash can be resolved against Life, since Death has a radical power to infect in itself everything with which it comes into contact. Not taking all this into account, acting ‘as if’ it were not – and this is the path currently practiced by the urban-centric neocapitalist culture – means allowing Death to celebrate its triumph in its mortal embrace with Life.
L.M. Lombardi Satriani
Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death — of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Now, a corpse, poor thing, is untouchable and the process of decomposition is, of all bad manners, the most vulgar imaginable. Because a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.
Aldous Huxley
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
Eugene Ionesco
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Carl William Brown quotes on death
