Passages about death and mortality

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.

Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.

I am very conscious that I am not wise at all; what then does the god mean?

Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?

I deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Nothing can ever be begotten of nothing by divine will.

What do I know?

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.

Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay. But you'll have to be up with the lark, she added.

What is the meaning of life? That was all, a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

I suffered those deeds more than I performed them.

Not to be born is best of all; and next best, by far, is to go back quickly where you came from.

The soul is the first actuality of a natural body which has life potentially in it.

If the eye were an animal, sight would have been its soul.

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains, but it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

He seems to me equal to the gods, that man who sits opposite you and hears you speaking sweetly and laughing. It makes the heart in my breast take flight.

Some say an army of horsemen, some of foot soldiers, some of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth; but I say it is whatever one loves.

Brekekekex koax koax.

The poet should be admired for skill and for good counsel, and because we make people better in their cities.

Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment perilous, and judgement difficult.

It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men's inexperience and to their wonder at its peculiar character.

My soul doth magnify the Lord. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.

He who saw the Deep, the country's foundation, who knew the proper ways, was wise in all matters.

My friend, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger, Enkidu, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger: the doom of mortals overtook him.

Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old; for no one is either too young or too old for the health of the soul.

Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement towards a thing, desire, aversion; and in a word, whatever are our own acts. Not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices, and in a word, whatever are not our own acts.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

God: there is no god but Him, the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful. Neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him. All that is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to Him.

There is no compulsion in religion: true guidance has become distinct from error.

For I, that God of Loves servantz serve, Ne dar to Love, for myn unliklynesse, Preyen for speed, al sholde I therfore sterve.

I am myn owene womman, wel at ese.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; / Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, and with forced fingers rude shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (that last infirmity of noble mind) to scorn delights, and live laborious days.

In Italy six hundred and forty; in Germany two hundred and thirty-one; a hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one; but in Spain, in Spain already one thousand and three.

Give me your hand, and say yes. It is not far; let us go from here.

And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream. / It is not now as it hath been of yore.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

I often think I have only one talent in the world, and that is a talent for boring myself to death.

For once in my life I want to have power over a human destiny.

For a long time I went to bed early.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house and studied the lighted square of window.

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.

The aim of all life is death, and, looking backwards, that what was inanimate existed before what is living.

What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.

April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.

Hecuba learns that her daughter Cassandra, the prophetess whose warnings no one ever believed, has been allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine, a fate Cassandra herself receives not with despair but with a wild, prophetic joy the other characters find deeply unsettling.

Andromache, widow of Hector, learns she is being given to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, the very man responsible for her husband's death, and must accept this fate while still grieving Hector and now facing the additional horror of her young son's impending execution.

There must be some one faculty to which all the objects of the several senses are made known, so that we perceive that we see and hear, and discern that sweet is different from white, not by sight or by taste alone but by some common power.

Recollection is, as it were, a kind of search, and belongs only to those creatures which are also capable of deliberation, for it is a sort of inference, one thing calling to mind another to which it is related by contiguity, similarity or contrast.

Epicurus states in the Letter to Herodotus that the universe consists of bodies and void and nothing else, that bodies themselves are either compounds or the indivisible atoms from which compounds are formed, and that these atoms are infinite in number and move continuously through an infinite void.

He argues that the soul is a body made of especially fine particles distributed throughout the frame, and that it perishes along with the body's dissolution, since a soul separated from the body it was distributed through can no longer possess the sensation that constitutes its actual nature.

Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, old age is suffering, disease is suffering, death is suffering, union with what is unpleasant is suffering, separation from what is pleasant is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering.

Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of the cause of suffering: it is that craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and passion, seeking delight now here, now there, the craving for pleasure, the craving for existence, the craving for non-existence.

Merest breath, said Qohelet, merest breath. All is mere breath.

A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever. And the sun rises and the sun sets, and to its place it pants, and rises there again.

Cicero writes to Atticus that he can bear his own exile, but not the destruction it has brought on his family, and asks his friend for nothing so much as continued honesty rather than comforting reassurance.

He tells Atticus he does not know which side to support, Caesar's or Pompey's, since he can see faults and dangers in both, and that indecision itself has become the most painful part of the whole crisis.

Cato tells Scipio and Laelius that old age is a heavy burden only for those who have nothing within themselves to rely on, while for those who look to their own resources, nothing that nature makes necessary can seem truly burdensome.

He argues that it is not by physical strength or speed that great things are achieved, but by deliberation, judgment and settled opinion, qualities old age does not diminish but actually tends to increase.

The father himself willed that the way of tillage should not be easy, and first stirred the fields by art, sharpening mortal wits with cares, so that labour conquered all, unrelenting labour and want pressing in hard times.

The first book ends with the sun darkened and the portents at Caesar's death, wars across the world, and a prayer that the gods allow Octavian to rescue an age overturned, the farmer's ploughshare turning up rusted javelins.

Horace advises seizing the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow, a piece of advice delivered within a specific ode addressing the shortness of life and the folly of relying on astrological calculation to predict how much time remains.

He claims to have built a monument more lasting than bronze and higher than the royal pyramids' structure, a boast that his poetry itself will outlast physical monuments, political power and even the erosion of time and weather that eventually destroys every material structure.

Pliny's private letters describe his villas, his reading and writing, court cases, the death of friends, and a haunted house, constructing a deliberately curated literary self-portrait of cultivated senatorial life rather than presenting raw, unrevised private correspondence.

In two letters to Tacitus, Pliny describes the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, in which his uncle the Elder Pliny died, giving history one of its most vivid firsthand eyewitness accounts of a natural catastrophe alongside genuine personal grief.

Epictetus states that men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinions about the things that happen, so that death itself is nothing terrible, since if it were it would have appeared so to Socrates, but the terror lies entirely in our own judgment that death is terrible.

He compares life to a play whose length and character the author has already determined, and insists that our own task is simply to act well the part that has been given us, whether that part is short or long, a beggar's or a king's, since choosing the role is not up to us but acting it well entirely is.

The True History parodies travelers' tales by taking its narrator on a journey to the moon and inside the body of a whale, announcing from the outset that everything the narrator relates is invented, a genuine novelty in ancient literature's typically more earnest claims to factual truth.

The Sale of Creeds stages an auction in which the major philosophical schools are sold off to bidders like commodities at a marketplace, turning philosophy's own claimed seriousness and dignity into comic spectacle through this deliberately undignified commercial framing.

For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God comes to our realm, although he was not far from us before. For no part of creation is left void of him; he has filled all things everywhere, while remaining present to his Father.

He took to himself a body capable of death, in order that it, participating in the Word who is above all, might be sufficient for death on behalf of all, and might, because of the Word who was come to dwell in it, remain incorruptible.

I am Fortune. Inconstancy is my very essence, it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever-changing circle.

No man can ever truly be secure until he has been abandoned by Fortune.

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

Often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked.

Conaire is warned from the start that he must never let two of his foster-brothers commit robbery in his kingdom without punishment, and when circumstance eventually forces his hand against them, the exile he imposes plants the seed of the very vengeance that returns to destroy him.

Travelling toward the hostel of Dá Derga, Conaire finds himself compelled by a sequence of small circumstances, three red horsemen on the road, a hunting party, to break one geis after another, each transgression individually explicable and yet cumulatively fatal.

The Völuspá presents a seeress recounting the creation of the world and foretelling its destruction at Ragnarök within a single continuous vision, giving Norse mythology a comprehensive cosmic frame running from absolute beginning through prophesied end.

The Hávamál collects sayings attributed to Odin, blending everyday worldly wisdom about hospitality, friendship and caution directly alongside the god's own mythic self-sacrifice, refusing any clean separation between practical advice and cosmic religious knowledge.

Dante recounts that when he first saw Beatrice, both of them nine years old, his vital spirit trembled so violently that he felt it in the most secret chambers of his heart, and from that moment love ruled over his soul.

In his sonnet on love and the gentle heart, Dante writes that love and the noble heart are a single thing, exactly as the philosopher says in his poem, one existing only where the other already is.

Julian describes seeing all creation as a small thing the size of a hazelnut, resting safely in the palm of God's hand, and understanding through this vision that everything exists and continues to exist only because God loves it and actively sustains it in being.

Julian relates the parable of the lord and the servant, in which a faithful servant falls into a ditch while hastening to do his lord's will, and the lord regards him not with anger but with compassion, reframing human sin's relationship to divine judgment through this unconventional parable.

The king sits in Dunfermline town drinking his blood-red wine, and asks where he might find a good sailor to sail his ship, and an old knight names Sir Patrick Spens, who receives the king's letter and laughs once, then weeps, knowing the voyage the season demands will drown him.

Two ravens sit discussing, in a tone of complete and chilling indifference, where they shall dine, and settle on a newly slain knight lying behind an old turf wall, known to no one but his hawk, his hound and his lady, who has already taken another mate.

Roper, who lived in More's household for sixteen years, records More's rise to Lord Chancellor and his conversations with Henry VIII in the garden at Chelsea, giving readers direct firsthand access to the personal dynamic between king and chancellor.

More refuses to swear the oath acknowledging the king's supremacy over the church, is imprisoned in the Tower, and is tried on the testimony of Richard Rich, Roper recording the actual pressures and arguments More faced rather than idealized retrospective summary.

Paré discovers that boiling oil in gunshot wounds did more harm than a simple dressing, a finding that emerged from a specific practical emergency, running out of oil during battle, rather than from theoretical medical argument alone.

Paré finds that ligating arteries after amputation beat cauterising them, replacing a brutal, painful standard technique with a more humane and effective alternative grounded in accumulated clinical observation across decades of military surgical service.

Faustus, having exhausted logic, medicine, law and divinity as conventional learning's inadequate limits, turns to magic, conjures the devil Mephistopheles, and signs away his soul in his own blood for twenty-four years of unlimited knowledge and power.

Despite his purchased unlimited power, Faustus spends his twenty-four years on largely trivial pursuits, playing tricks on the Pope, fetching grapes for a duchess, being shown a pageant of the seven deadly sins, and calling up the shade of Helen of Troy for private aesthetic pleasure.

Romeo Montague crashes a Capulet feast and falls in love with Juliet Capulet, and they are married in secret by Friar Laurence the next day, their love's compressed timeframe giving it genuinely dangerous intensity from its very first meeting.

Romeo kills Juliet's cousin Tybalt to avenge his friend Mercutio and is banished, demonstrating how thoroughly the older generation's feud reasserts itself even within the younger generation's attempted escape from it through violent, inherited obligation.

The rebellion continues after Shrewsbury but is ended by a trick, when Prince John promises the rebel lords redress and then arrests them once their army disperses, stages political victory through betrayal of given word rather than honorable combat.

Falstaff, now old and ill, recruits soldiers in Gloucestershire and dines with Justice Shallow, while the sick king broods on the crown he took, giving the play's comic relief genuine melancholy undertone alongside the king's own mortality.

The widowed Duchess secretly marries her steward Antonio, wooing him herself since he cannot woo her, against the wishes of her brothers, who have set the malcontent Bosola to spy on her.

Ferdinand torments the imprisoned Duchess with a dead man's hand, wax figures of her husband and children, and a chorus of madmen, and then has Bosola strangle her, her children and her maid; she dies saying, I am Duchess of Malfi still.

If they be two, they are two so as stiff twin compasses are two, thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show to move, but doth, if the other do; and though it in the center sit, yet when the other far doth roam, it leans, and hearkens after it.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, how little that which thou deniest me is; me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, and in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo.

Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith.

The life of Donne follows him from his Catholic upbringing through his secret marriage and years of poverty to his ordination and his deanship of St Paul's, and to his death, for which he rose from his sickbed to pose in his shroud.

The life of Herbert tells of a courtier who gave up preferment to become the rector of Bemerton, rebuilt the church, kept his parish with exact devotion, and died at forty, sending The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar to print or burn.

Argan is a healthy man convinced he is dying, surrounded by doctors and apothecaries who profit from his fear, a hypochondriac whose imaginary illness sustains an entire household economy built around treating a sickness that does not actually exist.

Argan wants to marry his daughter Angélique to a young physician so that he can have medical care in the family, while his second wife waits for him to die and leave her everything, two competing mercenary interests converging on his household.

Ventidius, Antony's loyal general, argues directly and repeatedly that Cleopatra has cost Antony everything a Roman should value, honor, command, the world itself, and that true friendship requires speaking this hard truth rather than flattering a friend toward his own ruin.

Octavia arrives in Alexandria with the couple's children, appealing to Antony's sense of duty as husband and father rather than to political ambition alone, and for a time genuinely seems to be winning him back to Rome before Cleopatra's own intervention reverses his course.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep, and as I slept I dreamed a dream.

The name of the slough was Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt, and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire.

Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen. / Come, you daughters, help me lament.

Und die Hohepriester und Ältesten hielten einen Rat über Jesum, dass sie ihn töteten. / And the chief priests and elders took counsel against Jesus, that they might kill him.

Johnson surveys mankind's actual desires across a geographic sweep from China to Peru, wealth, political power, learning, military glory, long life and beauty, arguing that each specific object of desire ultimately betrays those who actually succeed in obtaining it rather than merely those who fail to reach it.

Cardinal Wolsey rises to the height of political power before falling catastrophically, his eventual ruin serving as the poem's central English example demonstrating how political ambition, even when fully and successfully achieved, carries the mechanism of its own eventual betrayal within it.

The poem opens at dusk in a village churchyard, the curfew bell tolling the knell of parting day, the lowing herd winding slowly over the lea, and the speaker left to darkness and to himself among the graves of the obscure village dead.

The speaker insists that the unmarked dead beneath the turf might have possessed hearts once pregnant with celestial fire, hands that might have swayed empires or roused the living lyre, had not poverty repressed their noble rage and frozen the genial current of their soul.

Rasselas grows restless in the Happy Valley, an enclosed paradise where the royal children of Abyssinia are kept in engineered luxury specifically to prevent any restlessness, and finds that this manufactured contentment produces not happiness but a specific, gnawing dissatisfaction he cannot suppress or explain away.

Rasselas escapes with his sister Nekayah, her maid Pekuah, and the poet Imlac, and the group undertakes a systematic examination of different ways of living, the rich, the pastoral life, the hermit's withdrawal, and the reasoning philosopher, testing each option directly through observation rather than abstract argument alone.

Johnson states his critical opinions on figures like Milton and Gray without hedging, judging Milton's republican politics harshly even while praising Paradise Lost's genuine poetic achievement, and offering pointed criticism of Gray's odes that many contemporary readers found considerably less generous than expected.

The life of Cowley opens with Johnson's extended account of the metaphysical poets, a group he defines and critically evaluates as a distinct category, an influential piece of literary criticism that shaped how English poetry from this period would subsequently be classified and discussed.

He holds him with his glittering eye, the wedding guest stood still, and listens like a three years' child, the mariner hath his will.

Instead of the cross, the albatross about my neck was hung.

My hair is grey, but not with years, / Nor grew it white / In a single night, / As men's have grown from sudden fears.

I had a brother, who to me was more than father, mother, brother, all, and I had a sister who was more than any of the rest.

The lamp must be replenish'd, but even then / It will not burn so long as I must watch.

Forgetfulness! I ask of ye not one / Of your more terrible gifts, but that. / Ye have it not.

Emerson describes his own journals as his savings bank, a place where he deposited thoughts, observations and half-formed sentences to be drawn on later for lectures and essays, a metaphor that captures directly how much of his published, finished work actually originated in this considerably rougher private material.

Following the death of his five-year-old son Waldo, Emerson's journal entries become notably sparse, halting and raw, registering a grief his later published essay on the same loss, composed with considerably more distance and control, does not fully preserve in its original, immediate form.

Adonais, the dead poet, is mourned by Urania and by the personified dreams and desires that were his poems, and by a procession of fellow poets including a self-portrait of Shelley, gathering an entire poetic community around Keats's death and loss.

The poem turns from grief to consolation: Adonais is not dead but has become part of the one Spirit that animates nature, a specifically Romantic and pantheist answer relocating immortality within nature's ongoing processes rather than any conventional Christian afterlife.

But a mermaid has no tears, and so she suffers so much more.

But he has nothing on at all!