•"A god could save man by simply wishing it-from the farthest shore in the world...Though as for death, of course all men must suffer it: the gods may love man, but they can't help him when cold death comes to lay him on his bier" [Athena, Illiad, Bk III]
•"sum moribundus ['I am in dying']...I am moribundus. The MORIBUNDUS first gives the SUM its sense. -Heidegger [History of Concept of Time pg. 317]
•"Neither the sun nor death can be looked at for too long." -La Rochefoucauld [ Ely Black]
•“every poet begins (however 'unconsciously’) by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do.”-Harold Bloom
•Becaus philosophy opens out onto the whole of man and onto what is highest in him, finitude must appear in philosophy in a completely radical way. [Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics]
•Quiere decirse que tu esencia, lector, la mía, la del hombre Spinoza, la del hombre Butler, la del hombre Kant y la de cada hombre que sea hombre, no es sino el conato, el esfuerzo que pone en seguir siendo hombre, en no morir....Es decir, que tú, yo y Spinoza queremos no morirnos nunca y que este nuestro anhelo de nunca morirnos en nuestra esencia actual. [-Unamuno]
•"Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being." -Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
•'the more he is possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he will be pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly losing the greatest of goods, and this is painful' [Aristotle, NE, BK III, Ch. 9]
•"Was there ever a man more blest by fortune that you Akhilleus? Can there ever be? We ranked you with immortals in your lifetime...Think then Akhilleus: you need not be so pained by death" To this he answered swiftly: "Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus...better I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than lord it over all the exhausted dead."
•"Ancient philosophy was philo-sophia, not philo-theoria. It is to this original
understanding of the enterprise that Schopenhauer returns when he writes that
it is the chief task of philosophy, as it is of religion, to provide a ‘consolation’ inthe face of death. This, he says, is why Socrates was right to define philosophy as
a ‘preparation for death’. To this definition of the task he adds a further
specification: since death conceived as entry into a ‘dark’ and empty ‘nothing’,as absolute annihilation, is, for human beings, the summum malum, our worst fear,
any effective consolation must satisfy the ‘metaphysical need’; the need to be
assured of ‘the indestructibility of our true nature’ by death." [Julian Young]
•Eurete moi he entole eis zoen, aute eis thanaton. [and the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. ] [st. Paul]
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