The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.
Interpretation
The way we live shapes how we confront death.
This quote emphasizes that a dignified life leads to a dignified death. It suggests that our actions, values, and how we treat others throughout our lives contribute to the sense of dignity we carry with us when facing mortality, implying that living with integrity and purpose can provide comfort in the end.
In practice
During a eulogy that reflects on the life of a beloved figure.
Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.
Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.
Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression.
I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.
Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.
The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope that we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.
The only thing America respects is power and power concedes nothing. After the LA Riots, they tried to calm us down and nothing changed since.
I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.
A government capable of controlling the whole, and bringing its force to a point, is one of the prerequisites for national liberty. We combine in society, with an expectation to have our persons and properties defended against unreasonable exactions either at home or abroad.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes.
When men are full of envy they disparage everything, whether it be good or bad.
To be born in India is to arrive into the world swimming in religion.
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