Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
deathquotes
No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.
I do not believe that a man should be restrained in his daily actions by being afraid of punishment after death or that he should do things only because in this way he will be rewarded after he dies.
Hours before his death in 1955 from a ruptured abdominal aortic ayeurysm, Albert Einstein’s doctors proposed trying a new and unproven surgery as a final option for extending his life. Einstein refused. “I have done my share,” he said. “It is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”
Everyone owes nature a death.
If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones”.
Undoubtedly, on his death bed, at that moment when, ever since Socrates, it has been proper to pronounce certain elevated words, he told his wife, as one of my uncles told his, who had watched beside him for twelve nights, “I do not thank you, Therese; you have only done your duty.
I’ve been very near death. And you can’t imagine the wild elation of those moments – it’s the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it – when one meets death face to face. The Royal Way (1935).
Our life is to be regarded as a loan received from death, with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.