Do not believe that others will die, not you.... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that true immortality comes from living fearlessly rather than the mere desire to avoid death.
Mary Renault's quote reflects the idea that fearing death is a common human experience, but our true essence and immortality are found in how we confront life itself. The act of overcoming fear allows one to truly live in the moment, making every experience meaningful and everlasting, rather than being shackled by the fear of death.
In practice
This quote can inspire a group discussion on fear and how we can find freedom in facing our mortality.
Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one's grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.
One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.
In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.
I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a King. And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.
Western people ask me whether it is a paradox that I am King but support democracy. I have to tell them that in Thailand, the King is the guarantor of democracy.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all of the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Two races share today the soil of Canada. These people had not always been friends. But I hasten to say it. There is no longer any family here but the human family. It matters not the language people speak, or the altars at which they kneel.
If you can get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
The armies of the day have chased the army of the night, Heaven and earth are filled with purity and light.
The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property.
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