psychotherapy: Charles de Gaulle said, “The...

psychotherapy:

Charles de Gaulle said, “The cemetaries of the world are full of indispensable men” - one of my father’s very favorite quotations, and mine as well. It’s consolation, of a sort: everybody tries, no one wins, everybody dies.

Propertius said, “Among the dead are thousands of beautiful women.”

Juvenal: “Weigh the dust of Alexander the Great and the village drunkard, and they’ll weigh the same.”

Schopenhauer: “We are all lambs led to slaughter.”

At 51, Tchaikovsky said: “I am aging fast, I am tired of life, I thirst for quietness and a rest from all these vanities, emotions, disappointments, etc. etc. It is natural for an old man to think of a prospective dirty hole called a grave.”

Freud said, “What lives, wants to die again. Originating in dust, it wants to be dust again. Not only the life-drive is in them, but the death-drive as well.”

In 44 B.C., Cicero said, “No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year”; he died in 43. B.C. On his deathbed, William Saroyan said, “Everybody has got to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Edward Young wrote, “All men think all men mortal but themselves.” The ancient Indian epic Mahabharata asks, “Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.”

- David Shields, The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead