CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The splendid achievements of the intellect, like the soul, are everlasting.

Sallust
The War with Jugurtha [c. 41 b.c.], sec.2

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
The bed be blest that I lie on.
Four angels to my bed,
Four angels round my head,
One to watch, and one to pray,
And two to bear my soul away.

Thomas Ady
A Candle in the Dark [1655]

This bread of life dropped in thy mouth doth cry:
Eat, eat me, soul, and thou shalt never die.

Edward Taylor
Poetical Works [1939].
Sacramental Meditations, 8

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

The New England Primer

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.

William Wordsworth
Ode
Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood [1807], st. 5

The soul of man is larger than the sky,
Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark
Of the unfathomed center.

David Hartley Coleridge
To Shakespeare

Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass [1855-1892].

The world, the race, the soul-in space and time the universes, All bound as is befitting each-all surely going somewhere.

Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass [1855-1892].

Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful:
The seeds of godlike power are in us still:
Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will.

Matthew Arnold
Written in Emerson's Essays [1849]

Before ever land was,
Before ever the sea,
Or soft hair of the grass,
Or fair limbs of the tree,
Or the flesh-colored fruit of my branches, I was, and thy soul was in me.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Hertha [1871], st. 2

I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley
Echoes [1888] No.4,
In Memoriam R. T. Hamilton Bruce
("Invictus"),st. 4

Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be apprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual. . . . Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.

Sigmund Freud
Moses and Monotheism [1938]

[The Indian] sees no need for setting apart one day in seven as a holy day, since to him all days are God's.

Ohiyesa
The Soul of the Indian [1911]

Nearness to nature . . . keeps the spirit sensitive to impressions not commonly felt, and in touch with the unseen powers.

Ohiyesa
The Soul of the Indian [1911]

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.

William Butler Yeats
The Winding Stair and Other Poems [1933].
A Dialogue of Self and Soul, II, st. 3

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

Carl Gustav Jung
From Psychological Reflections:
A Jung Anthology [1953], p. 46: vol. 10,
The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man [1934]

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

D avid H erbert Lawrence
The Ship of Death [1932],VI

He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

William Faulkner
Speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize [December 10, 1950]

Please allow me to introduce myself,
I'm a man of wealth and taste.
I've been around for long, long years,
Stolen many a man's soul and faith.

Keith Richards
Sympathy for the Devil [1968]

Who can number the sand of the sea, and the drops of rain, and the days of eternity?

The Holy Bible, The Apocrypha
The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach,
or Ecclesiasticus Chapter 1, Verse 2

Thou know'st 'tis common; all that live must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

William Shakespeare
Hamlet [1600-1601],
Act: I, Scene: ii, Line: 72

The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity.

Sir Thomas Browne
Christian Morals [1716], III, 29

Yet some there be that by due steps aspire
To lay their just hands on that golden key
That opes the palace of Eternity.

John Milton
Comus [1634],l. 12

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress [1650-1652]

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Adonais [1821], st. 52

The horologe of Eternity
Sayeth this incessantly-
"Forever-never!
Never-forever!"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Old Clock on the Stairs [1845], st. 9

This world . . . ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.

Heraclitus
On the Universe, fragment 20

Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.

Heraclitus
On the Universe, fragment 77

Journey over all the universe in a map, without the expense and fatigue of traveling, without suffering the inconveniences of heat, cold, hunger, and thirst.

Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote de la Mancha [1605-1615]
Pt. II [1615], bk.III, ch.6,p. 479

Praised be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love-but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass [1855-1892].
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

Max Planck
The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics [1931]

It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless universe, living its brief life uncared for, on this dark, cooling star: but even so-and all the more-what marvelous creatures we are! What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians! It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is-blind or not-a good world to live in, a promising universe. . . . We once thought we lived on God's footstool; it may be a throne.

Clarence Day
This Simian World [1920]. XIX

Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. . . . I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.

J ohn B urdon S anderson Haldane
Possible Worlds [1927]

We doctors know
a hopeless case if-listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

E dward E stlin Cummings
One Times One [1944]

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer's Universe,
interview with Richard Burgin
in the New York Times Magazine [December 3, 1978]

Death is in my sight today
As when a man desires to see home
When he has spent many years in captivity.

The Man Who Was Tired of Life
Song, st. 30

God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

The Holy Bible, The New Testament
Revelation Chapter 21, Verse 4

It would be absurd to say of the [enlightened] monk, with his heart set free, that he believes that the perfected being survives after death-or indeed that he does not survive, or that he does and yet does not, or that he neither does nor does not. Because the monk is free his state transcends all expression, predication, communication, and knowledge.

The Pali Canon
Suttapitaka.
Digha-nikaya, Chapter 1, Verse 1 Chapter 2, Verse 65

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

Plato
Dialogues, Apology, sec.41

For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead;
Therefore over the inevitable
Thou shouldst not grieve.

Bhagavad Gita

Whatsoever state [of being] meditating upon
He leaves the body at death,
To just that he goes, son of Kunti,
Always being made to be in the condition of that.

Bhagavad Gita

. . . .that same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in the eternal world.

Amulek
Alma 34:34
Book of Mormon

There is something beyond the grave; death does not end all, and the pale ghost escapes from the vanquished pyre.

Sextus Propertius
Elegies,IV, vii, 1

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Meditations,IV,5

Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.
And from which earth, and grave, and dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

Sir Walter Raleigh
A version of one of his earlier poems,
found at his death in his Bible in the
Gatehouse at Westminster

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

Francis Bacon
Essays [1625],
Of Death

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar [1598-1600],
Act: II, Scene: ii, Line: 32

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.

William Shakespeare
Macbeth [1605-1606],
Act: V, Scene: v, Line: 17

One who longs for death is miserable, but more miserable is he who fears it.

Julius Wilhelm Zincgref
Apophthegmata, bk. II [1628]

Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just!
Shining nowhere but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark!

Henry Vaughan
Silex Scintillans [1655].
They Are All Gone, st. 5

Death in itself is nothing; but we fear
To be we know not what, we know not where.

John Dryden
Aureng-Zebe [1676], act IV, sc. i

Death is an eternal sleep.

Joseph Fouche
Inscription placed by his orders on cemetery gates [1794]

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

Alphonse de Lamartine
Meditations Poetiques [1820].
2nd series. Sermon 15

Death is the veil which those who live call life:
They sleep, and it is lifted.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Prometheus Unbound [1818-1819],
actIII, sc.iii, l. 113

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

William Cullen Bryant
Thanatopsis [1817-1821],l. 73

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.

John Keats
Letter to George and Georgiana Keats
[October 14, 1818]

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.

John Keats
To Fanny Brawne [July 25, 1819]

"Guess now who holds thee?"
"Death," I said. But there
The silver answer rang
"Not Death, but Love."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnets from the Portuguese [1850], no.1

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Edgar Allan Poe
The Premature Burial [1844]

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass [1855-1892].
Starting from Paumanok,12

Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass [1855-1892].
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, 14

Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continuous despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learned from Kiezewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius-man in the abstract-was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi
The Death of Ivan Ilych [1886]

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

Mark Twain
Pudd'nhead Wilson [1894].
Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, ch.3

None shall part us from each other,
One in life and death are we:
All in all to one another-
I to thee and thou to me!
Thou the tree and I the flower-
Thou the idol; I the throng-
Thou the day and I the hour-
Thou the singer; I the song!

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert
Iolanthe [1882], act I

On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. . . . Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.

John Muir
A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf [1916]

Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.

Rossiter Worthington Raymond
A Commendatory Prayer

for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis.

E dward E stlin Cummings
since feeling is first [1926]

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Anais Nin
The Diary of Anais Nin,
vol.II [1967], August 1935

This is the noble truth of sorrow. Birth is sorrow, age is sorrow, disease is sorrow, death is sorrow . . . in short, all the five components of individuality [khandas] are sorrow.
And this is the noble truth of the arising of sorrow. It arises from craving, which leads to rebirth, which brings delight and passion . . .
And this is the noble truth of the stopping of sorrow. It is the complete stopping of that craving . . . being emancipated from it . . .
And this is the noble truth of the way which leads to the stopping of sorrow. It is the noble eightfold path.

The Pali Canon
Suttapitaka
Samyutta-nikaya,
Chapter 1, Verse 1 Chapter 5, Verse 421

...................... To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
........
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

William Shakespeare
Hamlet [1600-1601],
Act: III, Scene: i, Line: 56

Chapter Sixteen

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