C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Suicide
We must not pluck death from the Maker’s hand.
Suicide is not a remedy.
Child of despair, and suicide by name.
He only who gave life has a power over it.
’T is more brave to live than to die.
Bid abhorrence hiss it round the world.
He is not valiant that dares lie; but he that boldly bears calamity.
I’m weary of conjectures: this must end them.
It is no less vain to wish death than it is cowardly to fear it.
Shall Nature, erring from her first command, self-preservation, fall by her own hand?
There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.
To die in order to avoid the pains of poverty, love, or anything that is disagreeable, is not the part of a brave man, but of a coward.
Against self-slaughter there is a prohibition so divine, that cravens my weak hand.
God has appointed us captains of this our bodily fort, which, without treason to that majesty, are never to be delivered over till they are demanded.
I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man in efficiently destroyed, though the appetite of the brute may survive.
Some indeed have been so affectedly vain as to counterfeit immortality, and have stolen their death in hopes to be esteemed immortal.
By all human laws, as well as divine, self-murder has ever been agreed on as the greatest crime.
What poetical suicides and sublime despair might have been prevented by a timely dose of blue pill, or the offer of a loge aux Italiens!
The more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves, more than their even Christian.
We ought not to quit our post without the permission of Him who commands; the post of man is life.
When affliction thunders over our roofs, to hide our heads, and run into our graves, shows us no men, but makes us fortune’s slaves.
Fool! I mean not that poor-souled piece of heroism, self-slaughter. Oh, no; the miserablest day we live there’s many a better thing to do than die!
Those men who destroy a healthful constitution of body by intemperance as manifestly kill themselves as those who hang or poison or drown themselves.
He who, superior to the checks of Nature, dares make his life the victim of his reason, does in some soft that reason deify, and take a flight at heaven.
Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it, since as many live because they are afraid to die as die because they are afraid to live.
The dread of something after death, that undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear the ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.
Suicides pay the world a bad compliment. Indeed, it may so happen that the world has been beforehand with them in incivility. Granted. Even then the retaliation is at their own expense.
Men would not be so hasty to abandon the world either as monks or as suicides, did they but see the jewels of wisdom and faith which are scattered so plentifully along its paths; and lacking which no soul can come again from beyond the grave to gather.
Suicide is not to fear death, but yet to be afraid of life. It is a brave act of valour to contemn death; but when life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live; and herein religion hath taught us a noble example, for all the valiant acts of Curtius, Scarvola, or Codrus, do not parallel or match that one of Job.
Suicide is a crime the most revolting to the feelings; nor does any reason suggest itself to our understanding by which it can be justified. It certainly originates in that species of fear which we denominate poltroonery. For what claim can that man have to courage who trembles at the frowns of fortunes? True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life in whatever shape they may challenge him to combat.
Our pious ancestors enacted a law that suicides should be buried where four roads meet, and that a cart-load of stones should be thrown upon the body. Yet when gentlemen or ladies commit suicide, not by cord or steel, but by turtle-soup or lobster-salad, they may be buried in consecrated ground, and under the auspices of the Church; and the public are not ashamed to read an epitaph on their tombstones false enough to make the marble blush. Were the barbarous old law now in force that punished the body of the suicide for the offence of his soul, we should find many a Mount Auburn at the cross-roads.