Writers on... Death (A Book of Quotes, Poems and Literary Reflections). Amelia Carruthers

Writers on... Death (A Book of Quotes, Poems and Literary Reflections)

how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond; And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring. Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.

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Is the sheered not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king? Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink form the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

– Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931), a Lebanese artist, poet and writer, best known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book, The Prophet – in which the quotation above appears. It consists of a series of philosophical essays, written in poetic prose, dealing with topics such as love, marriage, freedom, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion and death.

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Life and Death

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You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.

– The Epic of Gilgamesh; an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia dating from the 'Third Dynasty of Ur' (c. 2100 BCE). It is often regarded as the first great work of literature, and the first surviving version, the 'Old Babylonian', dates to the eighteenth century BCE.

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Life and death are balanced, as it were, on the edge of a razor.

– Homer, the first and the greatest of the epic poets, thought to have lived around 850 BCE. Nestor, Knight of Gerene, speaking of the peril facing the Achaeans, in 'Book X' of The Iliad (written around 800 BCE).

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If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.

– Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 - c. 496 BCE), the Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called 'Pythagoreanism'. As quoted in Bibliotheca Sacra and Theological Review, Vol. IV, No. 8 (1847).

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It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

– Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180 CE), Roman Emperor from 161-180 CE, and the last of the 'Five Good Emperors.' Marcus Aurelius is also considered one of the most important Stoic philosophers, and the above comes from his Meditations.

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Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream. Only sayings of the wise will remain.

– Kabir (c. 1440 - 1518), a mystic poet and saint of India, whose writings have greatly influenced the Bhakti movement. The name Kabir comes from Arabic al-Kabīr which means 'The Great'. The Bijak of Kabir (exact date unknown).

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Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

– William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616); Prospero speaking in anticipation of his daughter's wedding, in Act IV, scene 1 of The Tempest (believed to have been written in 1610 - 11).

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O weep for Adonis - He is dead.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep, He hath awaken'd from the dream of life; 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain; Nor, when the spirit's self has ceas'd to burn, With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822), 'Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats' (1821). Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets, regarded by some critics as the finest lyric poet in the English language. Keats and Shelley were good friends, and in 1820, on hearing of his illness from

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