Pietro Metastasio Quotes

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death.

Almost every time I am in a lectureship on a college campus, young people will say, If there is a God and if he is a loving and merciful God, how do you explain the problems of suffering and death and all the tragedies that happen to people?

I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils.

Unjustly men hate death, which is the greatest defence against their many ills.

When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.

Death cures all ills. Well, most of them.

There are evils worse than death.

Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

If this is dying, I don't think much of it.

Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between.

We are all sure of two things, at least; we shall suffer and we shall all die.

There is only one ultimate and effectual preventative for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death.

Children are dying." Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.

Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it.

It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box would you?... Even taking into account the fact that you're dead, it isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off-- I'm going to stuff you in this box now would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all.

I saw my own blood and I thought, how could I live in a world where this exists- where love can become death?

Love, sex, food, friendship, art, play, beauty and the simple pleasure of a cup of tea are all well and good, but never forget that God/the universe is determined to kill you by whatever means necessary.

There is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain which death does not remove.

There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.

But soon, I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct.

[In] death at least there would be one profit; it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others; and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.