Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless.
Although it takes us many years and many tears to discover it, life is only another name for death; they cannot exist independently.
One said of suicide, “As long as one has brains one should not blow them out.” And another answered, “But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.”
Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.
Guns are always the best method for a private suicide. They are more stylish looking than single-edged razor blades, and natural gas has gotten so expensive. Drugs are too chancy. You might miscalculate the dosage and just have a good time.
The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.
I’ve stopped thinking all the time of what happened yesterday. And stopped asking myself what’s going to happen tomorrow. What’s happening today, this minute, is what I care about. I say: What are you doing at this moment, Zorba? . . . I’m kissing a woman. Well, kiss her well, Zorba. And forget all the rest while you’re doing it; there’s nothing else on earth, only you and her!
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, From the laziness that is content with half-truths, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, O God of Truth, deliver us.
A primary cause of suffering is delusion: our inability . . . to see things the way they truly are. . . . The world is in fact a seamless and dynamic unity: a single living organism that is constantly undergoing change. Our minds, however, chop it up into separate, static bits and pieces, which we then try mentally and physically to manipulate. One of the mind’s most dear creations is the idea of the person and, closest to home, of a very special person which each one of us calls “I”: a separate, enduring ego or self. In a moment, then, the seamless universe is cut in two. There is “I” — and there is all the rest.
Be very careful about locating good or God, right or wrong, legal or illegal, at your favorite level of consciousness.
Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live on the principle that life is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same.
Never in any case say, I have lost such a thing, but, I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is this not also a return?
The Great Way is obvious to all my friends. They point it out quite readily on request, sometimes without request. Their words are painful because they threaten my character. I have to choose between the Great Way and me. An easy choice on paper — a hard one in fact.
All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
The hunger of the spirit for eternity — as fierce as a starving man’s for bread — is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.
If logic tells you that life is a meaningless accident, don’t give up on life. Give up on logic.
