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.
While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, The fate of empires and the fall of kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp the Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention.
Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb.
Are we not formed, as notes of music are, _x000D_ For one another, though dissimilar?
We are anxious because we do not know what roles to pursue, what principles for action to believe in. Our individual anxiety, somewhat like that of the nation, is a basic confusion and bewilderment about where we are going.
Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. ... near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.
The most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendents not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships, or being patronised by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it.
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