Dance, my darling dance! If you dance then death can't catch you! Nothing bad can touch you! Dance!
It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it.
That cake tasted good. But the cake in the garbage tasted better. It was the best cake I ever ate.
The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.
It’s quite simple. Death isn’t what we think it is. It isn’t life which ends but time which stops.
To live is to be vulnerable. A thin membrane of a soap bubble separates one from impenetrable hell. Ice on the road. The unlucky division of an aging cell. A child picks up a pill from the floor. Words stick to each other, line up, obedient to the great harmony of speech...
এ ভুবনে ডুবল যে চাঁদ সে ভুবনে উঠল কি তা? হেথায় সাঁঝে ঝরল যে ফুল হোথায় প্রাতে ফুটল কি তা? এ জীবনের কান্না যত― হয় কি হাসি সে ভুবনে? হায়! জীবন এত ছোট কেনে? এ ভুবনে?
For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
Was it not worth the loss of a little immortality to have that strange mix of innocence and strength close to him?
Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you. Have you given much thought to our mortal condition? Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen. All mortals owe a debt to death. There's no one alive who can say if he will be tomorrow. Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery. No one can teach it, no one can grasp it. Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink! But don't forget Aphrodite--that's one sweet goddess. You can let the rest go. Am I making sense? I think so. How about a drink. Put on a garland. I'm sure the happy splash of wine will cure your mood. We're all mortal you know. Think mortal. Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life, it's just catastrophe.
He is dead and I, the self serving coward that I am, still live. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Something everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think that when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor. Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.
The foolish rush to end their lives. Only the steadfast soul survives.
What can I say? I prefer to die well informed.
أحمق من يستسلم للموت طالما الحياة ممكنة
When your demon was yourself, there really was no way to fight or get rid of it.
Prate not to me of suicide, Faint heart in battle, not for pride I say Endure, but that such end denied Makes welcomer yet the death that's to be died.
Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.
I exist here, now. I'm not much interested in the future. Or, more precisely put, I do not believe in the future. To exaggerate a little, I have no faith that I will still exist tomorrow or the day after. What is more, I absolutely detest retrospection. That dislike is balances only by my desire to make my way back home as quickly as possible.
