#p

In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. ... Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. 'Tragic Death of "Promising" Young Man.' ... The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Flinn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' ... The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide's reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? ↗

— Julian Barnes

#suicide #death

I wish Lucilius you had been so happy as to have taken this resolution long ago I wish we had not deferred to think of an happy life till now we are come within light of death But let us delay no longer ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#death

Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions. ↗

— John Randolph

#once #our #perishable #possessions #time

We all must face death and walk with it. But we also must love and live in it. ↗

— Rolando Mithcell

#inspirational #love #poetry #death

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#photography #understanding #death

We've the whole wide world out there waiting for us, and we've forever to make the most've it. And that's the thing: enjoyin' life. Not livin' death, or anything stupid like that. What've we got to fear except the sun? ↗

— Garth Ennis

#garth-ennis #preacher #death

Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word "happy" in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky... ↗

— Herodotus

#happy #herodotus #history #life #lucky

Those of us who have seen violent death up close, who have seen what high-powered bullets can do to living human tissue, have a horror of inflicting that nightmarish, never forgotten damage on a fellow human being. Perhaps the only more terrifying prospect is that such a fate should befall us or our loved ones. This is why we, a representative cross-section of America's population, keep deadly weapons for personal defense. ↗

— Massad Ayoob

#lethal-force #regret #responsibility #death

The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved. ↗

— Théophile Gautier

#love #patience #wisdom #love

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird. ↗

— Tom Wolfe

#love