The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope that we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that the dignity of a person's life is reflected in their death, and that finding meaning in our lives provides hope.
Sherwin B. Nuland's quote suggests that death should not be viewed merely as an end, but rather as a culmination of the life lived before it. The dignity found in death is deeply rooted in how one has lived, and it is this understanding that imparts hope to us all. By acknowledging the significance of our experiences and contributions during our lifetime, we find a sense of meaning that transcends mortality, allowing us to face death with respect and serenity.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a memorial service to honor a loved one's life and legacy.
Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.
Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.
Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression.
I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.
Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.
The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.
Creative capitalism takes this interest in the fortunes of others and ties it to our interest in our own fortunes in ways that help advance both. This hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others can serve a much wider circle of people than can be reached by self-interest or caring alone.
Remorse is violent dyspepsia of the mind.
Those that have had great passions esteem themselves for the rest of their lives fortunate and unfortunate in being cured of them.
Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other.
We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor. May we never abandon them.
Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.
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