A Quote by Edwin Way Teale

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

Edwin Way Teale

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Death Destruction Less Nature Than Transmutation

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Edwin Way Teale
American - Writer
June 2, 1899 - October 18, 1980

If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction is so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense with it from this moment onward the idea of annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real what we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finish, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter. According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.

Marquis de Sade

Woman possesses the cosmic force of an element, an invincible force of destruction, like nature's. She is, in herself alone, all nature! Being the matrix of life, she is by that very fact the matrix of death - since it is from death that life is perpetually reborn, and since to annihilate death would be to kill life at its only fertile source.

Octave Mirbeau

Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.

Robin Hobb

Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

Alan Watts

By 'coming to terms with life' I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.

Etty Hillesum

Let us seek Death, or he not found, supply With our own hands his office on ourselves; Why stand we longer shivering under fears, That show no end but death, and have the power, Of many ways to die the shortest choosing, Destruction with destruction to destroy.

John Milton

Death is less bitter punishment than death's delay.

Ovid

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.

Baruch Spinoza

Someone's killed 100,000 people. We're almost going, "Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning! I can't even get down the gym. Your diary must look odd: 'Get up in the morning, death, death, death, death, death, death, death - lunch - death, death, death - afternoon tea - death, death, death - quick shower ...' "

Eddie Izzard

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.

Emilio Estevez

Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.

Conrad Aiken

Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.

William Shakespeare

Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation - they are the normal endings of the stately creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness.

Theodore Roosevelt

Eyes like streams of melting snow, cold with the things she does not know. Heaven above and Hell beneath, liquid flames to hide her grief. Death, death, death with no release. Death, death, death with no release.

Kiersten White

[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.

William James

But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.

Mark Twain

A Quote by Edwin Way Teale

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