Quotes · Skopia

10 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Suicide✕clear

Play · History (play) · Tragedy (play)

So every bondman in his own hand bears The power to cancel his captivity.

William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar · 1599

★ 1.1

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away…a man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.

Plato, Phaedo · 360 BC

★ 2.3

We cannot tear out a single page of life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.

Mauprut · 1837

★ 3.6

Play · Tragedy (play)

Against self-slaughter There is a prohibition so divine That cravens my weak hand.

William Shakespeare

Cymbeline · 1611

★ 3.8

Play · Tragedy (play)

Is it sin to rush into the secret house of death Ere death dare come to us?

William Shakespeare

Antony and Cleopatra · 1607

★ 3.9

Philosophical literature

The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 3.9

Play · Tragedy (play)

O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!

William Shakespeare

Hamlet · 1616

★ 4.7

Suicide... Is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.

1978

★ 5.1

Essay · Philosophical literature

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

The Myth of Sisyphus · 1942

★ 6.1

Play · Tragedy (play)

To be or not to be—that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep— No more—and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep— To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.

William Shakespeare

Hamlet · 1616

★ 8.7