They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction.
--
Lilith, in Pt. VGeorge Bernard Shaw
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Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?
The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.
But to live, — to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, — this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, — this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.Harriet Beecher Stowe
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.Alfred (Lord) Tennyson
Yes perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy of proving can be proven, nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge as the Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is another; and... perhaps there is an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.
Miguel de Unamuno
Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The nature of the mind is to interpret non-essentials essential. The mind creates artificial needs, believing it cannot live without them. In this way we carry a great burden of attachments throughout our life. Attachment is itself a great burden on our minds. We may never understand the extent of the burden till we’re free of it. But if we find joy within, we can live a simple life, free of endless complications.
Radhanath Swami
Shaw, George Bernard
Shaw, Roy
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