Death

Most men drift miserably between the fear of death and the torments of life:

even if no higher power threatens, every slave holds over you the power of life and death.

from the day you were born, you are being led to death.

— To show, if I can, that death is not only not an evil, but even a good.

— First, then, we must see what death itself, which seems the most familiar of things, really is.

These things perhaps you fear, and on that account you reckon death an everlasting evil.

wherever a man has stationed himself, thinking it best, or has been stationed by his commander, there he must, as it seems to me, remain and face the danger, taking no account of death or of anything else before the shameful.

You speak ill, my friend, if you think that a man worth anything at all should weigh the risk of living or dying, and not rather look to this one thing alone, whenever he acts:

"Then such a man will not think death a thing to dread?

Now the noblest form of death is death in battle, for it is encountered in the midst of the greatest and most noble of dangers.

for instance we do not call a man courageous for facing death by drowning or disease.

The courageous man, therefore, in the proper sense of the term, will be he who fearlessly confronts a noble death, or some sudden peril that threatens death;

I ask thee directly of the Puruṣa — how many are the limbs of Death?

There is added also death, which, like the rock over Tantalus, forever hangs above;

Thus from physics is drawn fortitude against the fear of death, and steadfastness against the dread of religion, and calm of mind, when ignorance of all hidden things is removed, and moderation, when the kinds of desires have been set forth;

And when the nature of all things is known, we are relieved of superstition, freed from the fear of death, not troubled by ignorance of things — out of which itself dreadful terrors often arise.

Hard upon death a scattering more great

Eternal death shall there be waiting still;

But grow more heavy after death.

But you also, judges, must regard death hopefully and must bear in mind this one truth, that no evil can come to a good man either in life or after death, and God does not neglect him.

For the state of death is one of two things:

We believe, do we not, that death is the separation of the soul from the body, and that the state of being dead is the state in which the body is separated from the soul and exists alone by itself and the soul is separated from the body and exists alone by itself?

May I not go, O King Varuṇa, into the house made of clay.

book, bird, Saʻīd, knowledge, death, circle, cone, existent, body, living, sentient, easy, beautiful

and like some of the meanings implanted in the mind by the effect of practice and familiarity, such as:

and certain shared general states, like death.

Consider how great a good a timely death holds, how to many it has done harm to have lived longer.

Death is the release and the end of all sorrows, beyond which our ills do not pass, which restores us to that tranquillity in which we lay before we were born.

O men ignorant of their own ills, who do not praise death as the best invention of Nature and await it—whether it shuts in happiness, or repels calamity, or sets a term to the satiety and weariness of the old man, or in its flower leads off the youthful age while better things are hoped for, or recalls childhood before its harder steps:

There is, believe me, great good fortune in the very necessity of dying.

for those sailing on this sea, so stormy and exposed to every tempest, there is no harbour but death.

from a lowly and sunken place he has darted up into that region, whatever it be, that receives in its blessed bosom souls released from their chains, and now he ranges there at liberty and surveys with the highest delight all the goods of Nature.

That very thing which is called dying, in which the soul departs from the body, is too brief for so great a swiftness to be felt.

For this reason, of all the things I willed to be necessary for you, I have made nothing easier than dying.

in the very midst of the altars and the solemn rites of those who sacrifice, while life is being prayed for, learn well the lesson of death.

"I will look upon death and upon a comedy with the same countenance.

But leave me and the foolish plan I have authored to suffer this terrible thing, for I will not suffer anything so terrible that my death will lack honor.

But my life has long been in Death’s hands so that I might serve the dead.

From Death alone he shall procure no escape, but from baffling diseases he has devised flights.

For if the reign of death works nothing but the dissolution of the flesh, accordingly life, contrary to death, must work the contrary — that is, the reintegration of the flesh — that, as death had devoured by prevailing, so too the mortal devoured by immortality may be able to hear, "Where, O death, is your sting?

For above too he says that the last enemy, death, is made void.

"O Lord, for Brāhmaṇas who thus follow their own Dharma as prescribed, how does death have power over these knowers of the Veda and the sacred treatises?

Through neglect of the study of the Vedas, through abandonment of proper conduct, through laziness, and through the fault of eating forbidden food, death desires to slay Brāhmaṇas.

"Listen, by what fault death desires to slay Brāhmaṇas.