Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Sunday, January 4, 2009

socrates, the gadfly of the b.c’s

because the wisest know nothing at all.
Socrates is quite respectable and admirable. His willingness to himself and what he stood for surpass the evils of the republic of Rome. He did not prefer to be exiled and coward away. He defended his reasoning and died with his reasoning. Of course, his philosophy was not killed along with him. It carries on. Point being.
"Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things, either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but the greatest king will not find many such days or nights, when compared to the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there . . . that pilgrimage will be worth taking. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again! . . . Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next; and I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. . . . In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier than we are, they will also be immortal, if what is said is true."

raison d'etre
"The unexamined life is not worth living. Doing what is right is the only path to goodness, and introspection and self-awareness are the ways to learn what is right."