Death
Yang Zhu agreed with the search for happiness, but he felt one should not strive for life beyond one’s allotted span, nor should one unnecessarily shorten one’s life. Death is as natural as life, Yang Zhu felt, and therefore should be viewed with neither fear nor awe. Funeral ceremonies are of no worth to the deceased. “Dead people are not concerned whether their bodies are buried in coffins, cremated, dumped in water or in a ditch; nor whether the body is dressed in fine clothes. What matters most is that before death strikes one lives life to the fullest” (Liu: 1967: 358).
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Famous quotes containing the word death:
“It is better to sit down than to stand, it is better to lie down than to sit, but death is the best of all.”
—Indian proverb, quoted in Sébastien-roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations, vol. 1, no. 155 (1796, trans. 1926)
“The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“But, when nothing subsists from a distant past, after the death of others, after the destruction of objects, only the senses of smell and taste, weaker but more enduring, more intangible, more persistent, more faithful, continue for a long time, like souls, to remember, to wait, to hope, on the ruins of all the rest, to bring without flinching, on their nearly impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)