Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations.
Oliver GoldsmithRead
Death when unmasked shows us a friendly face and is a terror only at a distance.
Interpretation
Death is less frightening when understood closely and personally, appearing more friendly than terrifying.
This quote suggests that the fear of death is often amplified by distance and lack of understanding. When we confront death directly, it reveals a different, more peaceful aspect, transforming from a source of terror into something more familiar and benign. The quote encourages us to reconsider our perceptions of mortality, seeing it not as the ultimate horror, but as a natural part of life that can bring wisdom and acceptance.
In practice
In a eulogy, reflecting on how a loved one's passing has brought new insights into life and death.
Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations.
A mind too vigorous and active, serves only to consume the body to which it is joined.
Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall.
Whatever the skill of any country may be in the sciences, it is from its excellence in polite learning alone that it must expect a character from posterity.
Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.
Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,_x000D_ _x000D_ Adorns and cheers our way;_x000D_ _x000D_ And still, as darker grows the night,_x000D_ _x000D_ Emits a brighter ray.
What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
For the record, I don't expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I'm a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar.
Without desire there is stillness, and the world settles by itself.
You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone.
But we had with us, to keep and to care for, more than five hundred bruised bodies of men- men made in the image of God, marred by the hand of man and must we say in the name of God? And where is the reckoning for such things? And who is answerable? One might almost shrink from the sound of his own voice, which had launched into the palpitating air words of order- do we call it? - fraught with such ruin. Was it God's command we heard or His forgiveness we must forever implore?
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