Death? (Lucretius Today Podcast Quotations)

DEATH 🙝

"Death has this much to be said for it:

You don't have to get out of bed for it.

Wherever you happen to be

They bring it to you—free.”

-Kingsley Amis

❧ This entry is titled Death, and will be a good place for quotations on fear, dying, and what happens--or doesn't--after.

Dawkins, Richard; Unweaving the Rainbow; 1998: "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

Montaigne, Michel de; Essais; 1595: "I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden."

Thoreau, Henry David; Journal; "You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this."