"It turns out that if the constants of nature - unchanging numbers
like the strength of gravity, the change of an electron and the
mass of a proton - were the tiniest bit different, then atoms
would not hold together, stars would not burn and life would
never have made an appearance."
-Newsweek
"Make no little plans; they have no
magic to stir men's blood"
-Burnham
"Napoleon was one day driving through the streets of Paris amid
cheering crowds. One of his suite remarked to him that it must
be gratifying to see how his subjects loved him. 'Bah!' said
the Emperor. 'The same rabble would cheer me just as madly if
I were going to the guillotine."
"The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And watch the men at play"
-Sarah Cleghorn
"Perhaps for all of us, certainly for most of us, our
death, the end of our world, the end of the whole world
maybe, symbolizes the moment of truth when our false hopes,
our pretenses and self-deceptions have to be finally
shed. It often symbolizes having at last to abandon
our illusions and wishful dreams and face the truth
about ourselves and others."
-Redfearn
"That is to say, material acquisitions, power, and a
life of hedonistic pleasure would be the order of the
day if all our endeavors ended in death. Contrarily,
one's creative and spiritual growth would be the
priorities of one expecting to continue his development
in an afterlife, or yet another life."
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
(Salvor Hardin)
-Isaac Asimov
"...lacking this perspective; the effects of our actions
on future generations can be shrugged off in the fierce
struggle to live now, to enjoy ourselves now. This is
our only time here, and we must make the most of it now."
"...such fantasies. They express the experience of the
bitter irony of things, of the fruitless revolt, of the
fatality ruling in human life. They whisper that all that
is happy and brilliant in life is but an illusion, soon
dispelled. The daily negation of desires and of dreams by
implacable and brutal reality...
-McDougal
"If God, or the lack of God, is responsible for the state
of the world, then we can easily wax cynical and resign
ourselves to apathy. What's the use? Why try changing
anything?"
"What! Out of senseless nothing to provoke a conscious
something to resent the yoke?"
-E. Fitzgerald
"To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile
fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when
all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo
even ambition when the end is gained - who can say this is not greatness?"
-Thackeray
"I know of no reason that would prevent me from believing
that the holy magnet which here so wonderfully attracts souls
to souls, would not under other transformations continue to
operate. And so I hope, one day, in another world, another
life, to be united again to those I loved in this life..."
-Schokke
"To live is by universal consent to travel a rough road. And
how can a rough road which leads nowhere be worth the traveling?
Mere living, what a profitless performance; mere painful living,
what an absurd!"
"If immortality be untrue, it matters little whether anything
else be true or not."
-Buckle
"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an
axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must
somewhere rest on pure joy."
-Bogan
"I know you've never cared for life, and to me, now at the age of
nearly fifty, life and death seem singularly close together in
all of us - and life a mere farce of frustration in all, so far
as the realization of the innermost ideals go to which we are
made respectively capable of feeling an affinity and responding."
-William James
"There remains love... it is in love, and in nothing else, that
we find not only the supreme value of life, but also the supreme
reality of life, and, indeed, of the universe... If the whole
memory of the love of a life is swept away at death, its value is
not lost if the same love is stronger in a new life because of
what passed before."
"There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known
we were meant to take."
-Guy Kay
"Every man dies, but not every man lives."
-Braveheart
"Yes, consent to circumstances, for circumstance is passing and
temporal, but life is eternal. Consent to life, to God, to the
processes that sometimes bring us happiness and sometimes
unhappiness, sometimes health and sometimes sickness, but that
inevitably pass on, whether we like them or not, advance us a
little further on that pilgrimage which is the chief end of
our earthly existence."
"...such fantasies. They express the experience of the bitter
irony of things, of the fruitless revolt, of the fatality ruling
in human life. They whisper that all that is happy and brilliant
in life is but an illusion, soon dispelled. The daily negation
of desires and of dreams by implacable and brutal reality..."
-McDougal
"If I can't believe that the spacecraft I fly assembled itself,
how can I believe that the universe assembled itself? I'm
convinced only an intelligent God could have built a universe
like this."
-Jack Lousma, Astronaut
"Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us
from this world to another."
-Plato
"I used to say of him [Napoleon] that his presence on the field
made the difference of forty thousand men."
-Wellington
"So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
When just the art of being kind
Is all this sad world needs."
-Ella Wilcox
"It is the thought that death appears to proclaim, the thought
of frustration and final unreason at the heart of things, that
is itself the root of the pessimist's despair... Give assurance
that it is not so, and the scene is changed. The sky brightens,
the door is left open for unimagined possibilities, things begin
to fall into an intelligible pattern..."
-Reincarnation
"Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it
happened, not even when it's over!... We're going to die and not
even know. We'll never know, and all this meaningless will just
go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it.
We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to
it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead without
even knowing."
-The Vampire Lestat
"Though no regrets are proper for the manner of her death,
who can contemplate the fact of it, and not call the world
irrational if, out of deference to a few particles of
disordered matter it excludes so fair a spirit?"
- FWH Myers
"When I was a young man, I, like so many others was bewildered.
I found myself asking the question... 'What are we here for?'
I found no answer. Without some answer to that question life is
empty, useless."
-Henry Ford
"It is well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be
none."
-Marcus Antoninus
"...for if life be a pleasure yet since death also is sent by the
hand of the same Master, neither should that displease us."
-Michael Angelo
"So far as a man judges any life, his own or another's, to be
valuable, here and now, in and for itself, apart from any
consideration of immortality, he will reasonably desire that it
should be repeated as often as possible, rather than occur once
and never again."
-Reincarnation
"Perhaps the fear [of death] is a fortunate evolutionary
adaptation, until we learn to outgrow it; otherwise deadly
carelessness or mass suicide would have terminated sentient
life long ago."
-Quickening Universe
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we
should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough
to disarm all hostility."
-Longfellow
"...they see themselves more and more like dried-up mummies.
All the experience gained during their long life now seems
useless and futile, soon to be swallowed up by death. And
death itself, despite religious beliefs, is often fearfully
dreaded as a plunge into an abyss of nothingness."
-Reincarnation
"It was his profound certainty that the life that is the human
spirit has lived and shall live timelessly, that the bonds
of love, devotion, and friendship shall bring together these
endlessly reborn beings, and that animosity, evil communications,
and hatred have the same effect of reassembling groups of
entities from one cycle to another."
-Reincarnation
"True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends,
but in the worth and choice."
-Donne
"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are
already three parts dead."
-Bertrand Russell
"Physicists have stumbled onto signs that the cosmos is
custom-made for life and consciousness."
-Newsweek
"But is not the assumption of an 'improbable chemical
accident' which results ultimately in something capable of
discussing the nature of 'improbable chemical accidents' a
staggering one? Is it not indeed preposterous? Is it not far
easier to believe that thought in some potential form must be
as primary as matter itself?"
-Josph Krutch
"You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees
and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters."
-St. Bernard
"...life has taught me that it knows better plans than
we can ... imagine, so that I try to submerge my own desires ...
into a calm willingness to accept what comes, and to make the
most of it, then wait again."
-Julia Seton
"Take courage mortal, death cannot banish you from the universe."
-Benjamin Franklin