LET’S MAKE A LIST: Death Related Quotes, Scripture and Books

A (longish) quote from Socrates I read at my little brother’s funeral:

For the fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real
wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows
whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest
evil, may not be the greatest good. Is not this ignorance of a
disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the conceit that a man knows
what he does not know? And in this respect only I believe myself to
differ from men in general, and may perhaps claim to be wiser than they
are:—that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose
that I know. [...]

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great
reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things—either death
is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say,
there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.
Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the
sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an
unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his
sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the
other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many
days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more
pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private
man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights,
when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say
that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say,
all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater
than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is
delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the
true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus
and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in
their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a
man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and
Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I myself, too,
shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and conversing with
Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other ancient hero who
has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no
small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs.
Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and
false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next; and I shall find
out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would
not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great
Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men
and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with
them and asking them questions! In another world they do not put a man
to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier
than we are, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.

   0 likes