The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of... antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is hea...vily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles which we call by the comprehensive t...erm democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What heaven-entreated heart is this Stands trembling at the gate of bliss;... Holds fast the door, yet dares not venture Fairly to open it and enter? Whose definition is a doubt 'Twixt life and death, 'twixt in and out?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O to dream, O to awake and wander There, and with delight to take and render,... Through the trance of silence, Quiet breath; Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses, Only the mightier movement sounds and passes; Only winds and rivers, Life and death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
MR. BLAKE,--I received your letter just as I was rushing to Fire Island beach to recover what remained of Margaret Fuller, and rea...d it on the way. That event and its train, as much as anything, have prevented my answering it before. It is wisest to speak when you are spoken to. I will now endeavor to reply, at the risk of having nothing to say. I find that actual events, notwithstanding the singular prominence which we all allow them, are far less real than the creations of my imagination. They are truly visionary and insignificant,--all that we commonly call life and death,--and affect me less than my dreams. This petty stream which from time to time swells and carries away the mills and bridges of our habitual life, and that mightier stream or ocean on which we securely float,--what makes the difference between them? I have in my pocket a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light,--an actual button,--and yet all the life that it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life ...so that you and your descendants may live...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »