September 3, 2007

• More Things that Explain Life

  In my own words:

  Death is part of life.  Living in fear is harder than dying.  Why fear dying?

  In the words of some other people:
  (In response to a Featured_Grownups challenge.)

  He not busy being born is busy dying.
  –Bob Dylan

  Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
  –Carl Sandburg

  Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.
  –Amelia Burr

  The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.
  –Publilius Syrus (ca.100 BC)

  Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.
  –Dorothy Thompson

  The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
  The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.
  The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.
  And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
  –Elie Wiesel (Oct. 1986)

  Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
  –Helen Keller

  If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
  –Isaac Asimov

  Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
  –Isaac Asimov

  Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
  –John Lennon

  And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.
  –Marcus Aurelius

  To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
  –Oscar Wilde

  And now the end is near
  And so I face the final curtain,
  My friends, I’ll say it clear,
  I’ll state my case of which I’m certain.
  I’ve lived a life that’s full, I’ve traveled each and evr’y highway
  And more, much more than this, I did it my way.
  –Paul Anka

  In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
  –Robert Frost

  People living deeply have no fear of death.
  –Anais Nin

  Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! … Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
  –Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. 
  –Charlotte Perkins Gilman    (Suicide Note, August 17, 1935)

  Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
  –Elbert Hubbard

  Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
  –George Carlin

  The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
  –Robert A.Heinlein

  If you live to be one hundred, you’ve got it made. Very few people die past that age.
  –George Burns (1896-1996)

  It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
  –Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

  Have the courage to live.  Anyone can die.
  –Robert Cody

  Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
  –Epicurus

  Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.
  –Bertolt Brecht

  As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
  –Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

  How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
  –Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams
  
  Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings
  and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as
  taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our
  blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and
  as beautiful as life.
  –John Muir

  Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
  Life is but an empty dream!
  For the soul is dead that slumbers,
  and things are not what they seem.
  Life is real! Life is earnest!
  And the grave is not its goal;
  Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
  Was not spoken of the soul.
  –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  For certain is death for the born
  And certain is birth for the dead;
  Therefore over the inevitable
  Thou shouldst not grieve.
  –Bhagavad Gita

  Still scared of dying?  Let it go.  Live in Love.

  

  • 1:14 pm
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