“The most obvious way of reconciling oneself to death is to make sure of enjoying life before death snatches it from us.”
Arnold J. Toynbee
Man’s Concern with Death (Primary source)
Man’s Concern with Death is a collaborative volume in which Toynbee and several fellow contributors examine death from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The book brings together religious, philosophical, psychological, medical, and forensic viewpoints, making it a distinctively interdisciplinary work.
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“The most obvious way of reconciling oneself to death is to make sure of enjoying life before death snatches it from us. The catchwords Carpe diem and Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die are notorious, and Herodotus has preserved an Egyptian folktale in which the Pharaoh Mycerinus, when the gods had sentenced him to die after enjoying only six more years of life, successfully doubled the term arbitrarily allotted to him by turning night into day. This hedonistic solution of the problem of death is, of course, illusory.”
Arnold J. Toynbee
“History, in the objective meaning of the word, is the process of change; in the subjective meaning, it is the study of how and why one situation changes into another.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“Technology is, of course, only a long Greek name for a bag of tools; and we have to ask ourselves: What are the tools that count in this competition in the use of tools as means to power?”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“A life which does not go into action is a failure.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“They rushed into it with their eyes open because they could not resist the bait.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary sourceMore quotes by Arnold J. Toynbee →
“He that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business by night.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal behind it.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad.”
— Ian Fleming Primary source“To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source