#death

Though his health and family had been broken in the process, he'd found his purpose in life — to share the ancient key discovered anew in the garden: if we feed the earth, it will feed us. I see that is the secret, too, to living. Though the earth demands its sacrifices, spring will always return ↗

— Melissa Coleman

#nature-of-things #seasons #death

From the standpoint of the upper classes, the system had many merits. They felt that what was paid out of the poor rate was charity, and therefore a proof of their benevolence; at the same time, wages were kept at starvation level by a method which just prevented discontent from developing into revolution...It was plainly the certainty, derived from the old Poor Law, that actual death would be averted by the parish authorities, which induced the rural poor of England to endure their misery patiently...it taught them respect for their 'betters'.While leaving all the wealth that they produced, beyond the absolute minimum required for subsistence, in the hands of the landowners and farmers. It was at this period that landowners built the sham Gothic ruins called 'follies', where they indulged in romantic sensibility about the past while they filled the present with misery and degradation. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#exploitation #the-poor #death

It was not so much a modification of the darkness, as a sigh of relief, a slight relaxing of tension, so that one felt, rather than saw, that the night had suddenly lost a shade of its density... ah! yes; there! between these two shoulders of the hills she is bleeding to death. ↗

— Hope Mirrlees

#death

Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death. ↗

— Spike Milligan

#life #puckoon #death

Even in terms of fiction, nothing in their lives became them like the leaving of it. King Fjolnir rose in the night to make water, fell into a vat of mead and drowned instead; Sveigdir ran after a dwarf when drunk and vanished into a boulder; Vanlandi was trampled to death by a nightmare; Domaldi was sacrificed for good seasons; Dag was struck on the head with a pitchfork when seeking revenge for his sparrow; and so on down to the fifth century. ↗

— Gwyn Jones

#vikings #death

Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death. ↗

— Roman historian Polybius

#death

We desire that God would give us the death-stroke; but we long to die without pain; we would die to our own will by the power of the will itself; we want to lose all and still hold all. Ah! what agony, what distress, when God has brought us to the end of our strength! We faint like a patient under a painful surgical operation. But the comparison is nought, for the object of the surgeon is to give us life -- that of God to make us die. ↗

— François Fénelon

#death

you can pass a football,you can gas,but you yourself cannot just pass~cam after lilly's mother informs her that lilly has passed ↗

— Wendy Wunder

#the-probability-of-miracles #death

LIII. What is the holiness of conversation? It is to master death. ↗

— Anne Carson

#god #irony #death

I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything - fortune, love, even a limb - if I could simply survive. ↗

— Guy Sajer

#fortune #life #love #soldier #survive