Tag: death
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/06/the-catastrophe-of-birth.html[🡕] Continue reading
Jetta – An autistic kid talks about the universe and the end of time
Chris: If you could share one message with the whole entire world, what would you say?
Jetta: The universe is about the end.
Chris: Why do you want people to know that?
Jetta: Because someday it will end in our face. Read the full page
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/09/excess-lucidity.html[🡕] Continue reading
u/homebrandusername, r/Pessimism Continue reading
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/05/essay-about-giving-up.html[🡕] Continue reading
If one thinks about the (obviously made up) religious scenarios, or any other kind of hellish stories invented by humans, it’s obvious that most real lives don’t even come close to that. Continue reading
Andrew McIntosh – On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas I’ve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesn’t mean much in the end anyway. It’s not like I believe there are such things as “Death Drives” and “the Will” and all that, they’re more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains. Read the full page
The loner is the one who withdraws his presence so as not to distress or bother others, to let them live their illusion, because truth brings nothing but pain. The lover who steps aside to let the other live, the Oblomov who doesn’t even try to make things work because he knows they can’t. How absurd it would be for time to fall in love with a girl, or for death to write her a love poem. Continue reading
William Shatner: my trip to space filled me with “overwhelming sadness”
William Shatner (Captain Kirk in Star Trek), after his trip in Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021. Continue reading
Discerning gullible people, with judgment
In these last decades, conspiracy theories blew up. Stuff inside vaccines, UFOs, chemtrails, but-you-can’t-see-the-stars, it’s weird for a building to collapse just because a large airplane crashed into it at 750 km/h, and so on… Continue reading
Underestimating Suffering & Suicide Thresholds
r/pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered Continue reading
Against the idea that suicide is not worth it, like some important authors say instead
In reality, we don’t kill ourselves because the rationalized suicide is basically impossible for everyone… Read the full page
My take on the ending of “Martyrs” (2008)
Lots of discussions on the Internet. Continue reading
Derek Muller went to visit Chernobyl… Read the full page
Umberto Galimberti – Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you don’t praise or exalt “the individual”, you are pessimistic, of course, right?… … Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isn’t he? Those who say “pessimism”… I’m like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
We contain the ending
Shape of Despair – Return to the Void
Why are normal people able to live (as explained by Lex Fridman)
Lex Fridman (a “normie”), explains in detail how he is able to live and not dwell on nihilism and depression, something that if you’re anything like me is fascinating and sometimes hard to fully grasp.
The bottom line is that it’s mainly how your brain is wired and its chemicals, which is consistent with the clear failure of psychotherapy in so many mental illness cases, and with the extensively demonstrated impossibility of changing the core of one’s personality – and, by contrast, with how drugs are a way more useful tool, albeit also limited and sadly inconsistent, chaotic, still not very issue-specific, and full of negative effects.
Things change faster and faster and we keep keeping up because we are afraid to die.
Vsauce in the video “Illusions of Time”, inspired by “Social acceleration” by Hartmut Rosa
And all the parties they fade And yes, my looks, they’ll go away I’ll just be left here in America But she never had a home for me
London Grammar – America
– […] I’d say you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives: we drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job… or the happy marriage. But these aren’t decisions, they’re… they’re impulses. In fact, you’re probably better equipped to explain this than I am.
– What does that mean?
– You’re a biologist. Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?
Annihilation (2018)
I believe that we do not die because we fall ill, but we fall ill because we must die.
Umberto Galimberti, in various lectures
It’s like with human life: if you’re lucky enough to reach old age, the phases of your life will be: birth, childhood, puberty, masturbation, masturbation with a partner, pathetic attempts at masturbation, and death.
Astutillo Smeriglia in his blog “In coma è meglio” (“Being in a Coma is Better”) – Come nasce una teoria del complotto (“How a Conspiracy Theory is Born”)
When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real. Read the full page
– Do you smoke a lot?
– As much as I can. As much as I can. I don’t even keep track. Whatever… I won’t die healthy, but it’s hard to die healthy. What really hurts is living, because by the sheer act of living, we die.
Vittorio Feltri in a home interview
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
What does it mean – and I close with this somewhat pedagogical note – what does it mean to “anticipate death”? That is, to be persuaded that one must die; what is the advantage of the tragic dimension?, which consists in the fact that you have to die and there is nothing waiting for you in the afterlife? The advantage is that you work a relativization of the problems of the now. You don’t rush like a desperate man, you don’t argue like a madman. You don’t kill yourself for the worries of the world, because you are mortal; you are mortal, and when you have to retire you don’t despair, you don’t die two years after: because death is still there waiting for you, it’s not as if life ends: you’re the one who made it coincide with your work life and outside that you no longer know who you are. Because by now our identities are assigned by our social roles, right? We know who we are only because others recognize us in a role, outside that we no longer know who we are; and indeed all actors and actresses lead tragic lives, why is that? Because they didn’t anticipated death, because they didn’t assumed it as a condition… like a thickness of the soul, here – let’s use this word even if it refers to an entity that does not exist, the soul indeed.
But let’s keep this anticipation in mind, because by relativizing things we stop those typical dramas of those who believe in the immortality of the soul and therefore believe that this life has its own importance, their Ego becomes hegemonic and what depends on the Ego decides life and death; a love ends, and women are killed because it’s all over: no, no, no, stop. If you internalize death in advance then you relativize all things, and all things don’t have that thickness of despair anymore (despair, not tragedy). But who are these desperate people? Those who had hope. Because those who never had hope, never despair.
Umberto Galimberti at Paisiello Theater in Ruffano (Lecce)
Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it.
Michel Houellebecq – Submission
About the movie “Melancholia” – Florin Flueras
All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. Read the full page
Of course everyone knows, on an intellectual level, that they won’t live forever. But that doesn’t mean that they really acknowledge it. Read the full page
The first time I watched Buffalo ’66 – Matteo Gagliardi
https://www.vice.com/it/article/znj883/buffalo-66-vincent-gallo[🡕] Continue reading
The Gift of Life – Astutillo Smeriglia
https://incomaemeglio.blogspot.com/2013/09/il-dono-della-vita.html[🡕] Continue reading
This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world. Blah, blah, blah, blah… Beyond there is what lies beyond. I don’t deal with what lies beyond. Therefore, let this novel begin. After all, it’s just a trick. Yes, it’s just a trick.
Jep, “The Great Beauty”, ending
I told him, at that time already, that my “not living” was dissolving the fear of dying… Read the full page
Music is Art. Art is solace. But true Art must embrace the emptiness of everything, the bitterness of existence itself. The music must be as close as possible to Death, the ultimate salvation. Otherwise, it will just be entertainment, raw fun, ephemeral diversion.
Solace for the Vanity, album “Amaritia”, 2011[🡕]
There are many ways of dying; the worst of them is to continue living.
This must be the place
– It’s the only theme. The passing of time.
People think that life is something else, but that’s not true, life is not your coin collection, it only is by illusion, once you have a wife by your side. What about after? Afterwards, everything around you is as if it didn’t exist and never existed, it has less value than a turd. Continue reading
Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
We humans actually like to die. Because it is the only thing that gives meaning to our life, and that puts an end to that painful feeling of perceiving our existence (as well as – but that’s obvious – to physical and psychological suffering). But at the same time, death reminds us of emptiness and nonsense. And so, this strange paradox is created, and between the two paths, most choose to distract themselves.
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
David Eagleman – “Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives”
– The ceiling is probably the last thing people see. At least for 90% of the people who die. Probably. And if you die, the last thing you see will be printed in your eye. Like a photograph. Imagine all those people with ceilings in their eyes.
Water Lilies / Naissance des Pieuvres
Why is there something rather than nothing?
https://skepticalinquirer.org[🡕] Continue reading
Gavazzeni: “Music worsens the man”
Alberto Sinigaglia (“ttL”, La Stampa, insert) Continue reading
Big city life Here my heart have no base And right now Babylon de ’pon me case
People in a show, All lined in a row. We just push on by, It’s funny, How hard we try.
[…]
Soon our work is done, All of us, one by one. Still, we live our lives, As if all this stuff survives.
[…]
I find myself in a big city prison Arisen from the vision of mankind
Designed, to keep me discreetly Neatly in the corner
[…]
Mattafix – Big City Life
The age-old development of consciousness Drives us away from the essence of life We meditate too much so that our instincts will fade away They fade away
What’s the point of life And what’s the meaning if we all die in the end? Does it make sense to learn or do we forget everything?
Epica – The Phantom Agony
Chance doesn’t exist But the path of life is not totally so predestined Time and chronology show us how all should be In the ways of existence To find out why we are here
Being conscious is a torment[🡕] The more we learn is the less we get Every answer contains a new quest A quest to non existence, a journey with no end
No one surveys the whole, focus on things so small But life’s objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesn’t exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
I’m not afraid to die I’m afraid to be alive without being aware of it
I’m so afraid to, I couldn’t stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we don’t grasp the meaning of our programmed course of life Our future has already been wasted by us alone And we just let it happen and do not worry at all
We only fear what comes And smell death every day Search for the answers that lie beyond
Epica – Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
Out of the womb, into the tomb.
Time destroys all things.
Irréversible
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Madness is simply pain.
Vittorino Andreoli
Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills the self and the other. Despair is a form of madness possible for man, for all men; it is, in fact, a human perspective, tied to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment.
Vittorino Andreoli, Il lato oscuro (“The Dark Side”) (2002)
Final Fantasy X – Auron talks about “the spiral of death”
Tidus: Why is it… everything in Spira seems to revolve around people dying?
Auron: Ahh, the spiral of death.
Tidus: Huh?
Auron: Summoners challenge the bringer of death, Sin, and die doing so. Guardians give their lives to protect their summoner. The fayth are the souls of the dead. Even the maesters of Yevon are unsent. Spira is full of death. Only Sin is reborn, and then, only to bring more death. It is a cycle of death, spiraling endlessly.
Final Fantasy X – Tidus and Auron during the imprisonment in Bevelle
I am the axis in the wheel of reincarnation The endless singularity
Thorns – Vortex
Nothing left to feel nor to understand.
I did not want to live my life. Nor did I even want to live for my death…
Shape of Despair – …To Live for My Death…
[…] every living creature on Earth dies alone.
Donnie Darko
“What surprises you most about mankind?”
God answered:
“That they get bored of being children, are in a rush to grow up, and then long to be children again. That they lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health. That by thinking anxiously about the future, they forget the present, such that they live neither for the present nor the future. That they live as if they will never die, and they die as if they had never lived.”
Often misattributed to the Dalai Lama; from “An Interview with God” by James J. Lachard (pen name of James J. Brown), early 2000s – wording may not match the original exactly.
We pass the time of day to forget how time passes.
Amélie – Hipolito (the writer)
We live with our dreams, but in the end, only the truth remains. And unfortunately we understand it only when we are gone.
Family Pack / Que faisaient les femmes pendant que l’homme marchait sur la lune?
[…]
You stand before the final dimension, and I am the darkness of eternity…
[…] All life bears death from birth. Life fears death, but lives only to die. It starts with anxiety. Anxiety becomes fear. Fear leads to anger… anger leads to hate… hate leads to suffering… The only cure for this fear is total destruction. Kuja was a victim of his own fear. He concluded he could only save himself by destroying the origin of all things – the crystal.
[…]
…Now, the theory is undeniable. Kuja’s action proves it. All things live to perish. At last, life has uncovered this truth. Now, it is time to end this world.
[…]
I exist for one purpose… To return everything back to the zero world, where there is no life and no crystal to give life. In a world of nothing, fear does not exist. This is the world that all life desires.
[…]
Foolish creature… Your fears have already deluded you. One day, you will choose destruction over existence, as Kuja did. When he sought to destroy the crystal, the purpose of life ended. Now, come…
Necron, Final Fantasy IX
For living on in others, in memories and dreams Is not enough You want everything Another world Where the birds always sing
The Cure – Where the Birds Always Sing
I am Ultimecia. Time shall compress, all existence denied…
Reflect on your childhood: your sensation, your words, your emotions…
Time… It will not wait.
No matter how hard you hold on. It escapes you.
And… [And you’re going to die. / And everything will be destroyed.]
Ultimecia (Artemisia), Final Fantasy VIII
On the Highwind, near the ending
Cloud: I’ve… been thinking too. About the universe… planet… ocean. How wide and big… No matter where I go and what I do it won’t change a thing.
Cid: Maybe you’re right. But I came up with something different. I always thought this planet was so huge. But lookin’ at it from space, I realized it’s so small. We’re just floatin’ in the dark. Kind of makes you feel powerless. […] That’s why I say this planet’s still a kid. A little kid sick and trembling in the middle of this huge universe. […]
Vincent: City of the Ancients… The Ancients… after a long time that is probably what others will come to call us… Hmm…hwa ha ha ha… It’s only a matter of time for us.
Final Fantasy VII
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The sinking of the Titanic represented the end of an era, the broken dream of the belle Ă©poque. As with the fall of the Babylonian empire, the sinking of the Titanic represented the symbol of the crumbling of proud empires, with a similar mix of rich, bourgeois and poor all destined together for the abyss. It was the end of a legend that married technology to wealth, materialism to romance, illusion to fantasy.
Massimo Polidoro, The Curse of Titanic
Choose life; choose a job; choose a career; choose a family; choose a fucking big television; choose washing machines, cars, Compact Disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance; choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments; choose a starter home; choose your friends! Choose leisurewear and matching luggage; choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics; choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning; choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish fucked up brats that you’ve spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future; choose life.
But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life […]
âś»
[…] the job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car, the Compact Disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three-piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.
Trainspotting, intro and ending
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page
And time will destroy all those as well. Why do people insist on creating things that will inevitably be destroyed? Why do people cling to life, knowing that they must someday die? …Knowing that none of it will have meant anything once they do?
[…]
Bleh! You people make me sick! You sound like lines from a self-help book! If that’s how it’s going to be… I’ll snuff them all out! Every last one of your sickening, little happy reasons for living!
Kefka, Final Fantasy VI, in its GBA translation by Tom Slattery
In the beginning of time, there was darkness. While I lay resting in my mother’s womb, I soon became a part of the light world; young in body, evil at heart. With little love around, I became aware of death. I should have been executed early in life for the crimes my mind commits daily.
Resurrection – Disembodies; then sampled by “Delta 9” in “Mortified”, and used in “Tricky Madness 2” by Krinkels
As the taxi took me through the city to the station, I felt as though I’d been dropped onto another planet, a cruel and hostile place. Inclined by character to silence and reflection, I’d always been repulsed by noise and uproar, by any manifestation of the excessive merriment that so often borders on violence. I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it.
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it. Read the full page
Terminator 2 – Apocalypse scene
In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Italo Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveler
Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.
[…]
Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. Read the full page
I took my bottle and went to my bedroom. I undressed down to my shorts and went to bed. Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
I took my choice. I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something.
Charles Bukowski – Women
– I saw the ocean, and I saw a mountain, and there were many people climbing up the mountain. It was like a procession. There was a lot of fog. I couldn’t see it very clearly, but at the very top was Death.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
A thought which is not secretly stamped by fatality is interchangeable, worthless, is merely thought…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
In paradise, objects and beings, assaulted by light from all sides, cast no shadow. Which is to say that they lack reality, like anything that is unbroached by darkness and deserted by death.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
An obsession with the precarious accompanies me in every circumstance: mailing a letter this morning, I told myself it was addressed to a mortal.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
In five hundred thousand years, it appears that England will be entirely submerged. If I were an Englishman I should lay down my arms at once.
Each of us has his unit of time. For one it is the day, the week, the month, or the year; for another, it is a decade, or a century… These units, still on the human scale, are compatible with any plan, any task.
There are some, however, who take time itself for their unit, and sometimes raise themselves above it: for them, what task, what plan deserves to be taken seriously? A man who sees too far, who is contemporary with the whole future, can no longer act or even move…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs—between a false promise and the end of all promises.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
Death belongs to the realm of faith – you’re right to believe you will die, mind you… It sustains you. If you didn’t believe it, could you bear the life you have? If we couldn’t totally rely on the certainty that it will end, how could you bear all this?
Jacques Lacan, conference at the Université Catholique de Louvain
Our Lady of the Turks – Carmelo Bene
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary. Read the full page
We should give the sense of death back to people.
Partner – P.P. Pasolini
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary.
Carmelo Bene – Our Lady of the Turks
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
We asked the woman if there was one thing she wanted more than anything else in life. She looked at us, puzzled. Then, in a half voice, she said: “To sleep. Three days in a row.” “Nothing else?” we asked. She nodded. “To die,” she replied; and she wasn’t joking.
Fazzoletti di terra (“Patches of Earth”), a documentary by Giuseppe Taffarel about two elderly farmers from Val di Brenta.
Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable – Stig Dagerman
I lack faith, so I can never be happy. A happy person would not fear his life was a meaningless drift toward a certain death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth where I can attract a god’s notice. Nor am I graced with the skeptic’s well-concealed rage, the rationality’s barren mind, the atheist’s burning innocence. So who am I to cast stones at those who believe in what I doubt? Much less at those who worship doubt as if it weren’t shrouded in a darkness all its own? The stone would only come back to strike me. For there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable. Continue reading
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
Ronald Laing
Life is a sexually transmitted disease that slowly leads to death.
A different version, from the Internet
The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line, Journey to the End of the Night
As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.
Heidegger – Being and Time
Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn’t tolerate therapies.
Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
An old legÂend has it that King MiÂdas hunted a long time in the woods for the wise Silenus, comÂpanÂion of DionyÂsus, withÂout beÂing able to catch him. When he had fiÂnally caught him the king asked him what he conÂsidÂered man’s greatÂest good. The daeÂmon reÂmained sullen and unÂcomÂmuÂnicaÂtive unÂtil fiÂnally, forced by the king, he broke into a shrill laugh and spoke: “Ephemeral wretch, beÂgotÂten by acÂciÂdent and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be your greatÂest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite beÂyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothÂing. But the secÂond best is to die soon.”
The Wisdom of Silenus as told by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Hector Berlioz
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth – look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
Søren Kierkegaard, journals
[…] deep, deep, and forever, into some ordinary and nameless grave.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Two truths that men will generally never believe: one, that they know nothing; the other, that they are nothing. Add a third, which is closely related to the second: that they have nothing to hope for after death.
Leopardi, Zibaldone, 4525-4526
The World as Will and Representation
[…]But, besides all this, death is the great opportunity no longer to be I;—to him who uses it. During life the will of man is without freedom: his action takes place with necessity upon the basis of his unalterable character in the chain of motives (ed. cause-effect chain). But every one remembers much that he has done, and on account of which he is by no means satisfied with himself. If now he were to go on living, he would go on acting in the same way, on account of the unalterable nature of his character. Accordingly he must cease to be what he is in order to be able to arise out of the germ of his nature as a new and different being. Therefore death looses these bonds; the will again becomes free; for freedom lies in the Esse, not in the Operari[…]
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, as found in “generic_gnostic_01_shard” in the video game “Cyberpunk 2077” (2020)
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.
The Tragedy of Macbeth (Act V, Scene V) – William Shakespeare
The Imitation of Christ – Thomas à Kempis
Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. Read the full page
Unfortunately, I shall have to say, my mother, why did you conceive me, son of bitterness and sorrow? Why did I not die in the womb? Having come forth from the womb, why did I not perish immediately? Why was I taken up on the knees? Why was I nursed at the breasts? Born to be burnt and to be fuel for the fire? Would that I had been slain in the womb so that my mother might have been my grave and her womb an everlasting conception. For I should have been as if I had not been, brought from the womb to the tomb.
Lotario dei conti di Segni (before becoming Pope Innocent III) – On the Misery of the Human Condition
See the gulf of time behind and another infinite time ahead. What difference is there in this respect between an infant who lives three days and someone who lives three times as long as Nestor?
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations, 4.50
Out of the womb, into the tomb.
(and variants)
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Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly, and of their own accord, preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward.
Socrates in “Phaedo” by “Plato”
I said to myself concerning the sons of men, “God has surely tested them in order for them to see that they are but beasts.
Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless.
Both go to the same place—they came from dust and they return to dust.
For who can prove that the human spirit goes up and the spirit of animals goes down into the earth?”
Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes, 3:18 – 21
Omnia fui, nihil expedit.
Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus
I’ve been all things, but all was worthless.
He whom the gods love dies young.
Menander, 4th-3rd century BCE
Memento mori.
(Remember that you have to die.)
A well-known expression dating back to the times of ancient Rome.
Eram quod es, eris quod sum.
I too was what you are (alive), you will be what I am (dead).
(Often found on gravestones.)