No one thinks he will escape death, so there is no disappointment and, as long as we know neither the when nor the how, the mere fact that we shall one day have to go does not much affect us; we do not care, even though we know vaguely that we have not long to live. The serious trouble begins when death becomes definite in time and shape. It is in precise fore-knowledge, rather than in sin, that the sting of death is to be found; and such fore-knowledge is generally withheld; though, strangely enough, many would have it if they could.
Samuel Butler (novelist)Related topics
affect care day death definite disappointment enough escape fact found live mere nor shape sin sting time troubleRelated quotes
But even further from the light were the cats. Their perfection was alarming. Wrapped up in the precision and meticulousness of their bodies, they knew neither deviation nor error. They sank for a moment, far into themselves, to the bottom of their being; they froze in their soft fur and grew menacingly and ceremoniously serious, and their eyes grew as round as moons, soaking up the view into their fiery craters. But a moment later, cast out to the edge, to the surface, they yawned in their nihility, disappointed and without illusions.
Bruno Schulz
By these things my Mind was now so turned that it lay like a Horse-leech at the Vein, still crying out, Give give, yea, it was so fixed on Eternity, and on the things about the Kingdom of Heaven (that is, so far as I knew, though as yet... I knew but little); that neither Pleasures, nor Profits, nor Persuasions, nor Threats, could loosen it, or make it let go his Hold. ...it is in very deed a certain Truth, it would then have been as difficult for me to have taken my mind from Heaven to Earth, as I have found it often since to get it again from Earth to Heaven.
John Bunyan
I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, "That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw? I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I've loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them!" Will you say so, Heathcliff?
Emily Brontë
I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.
Stephen Jay Gould
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Aldous Huxley
