Georges Journey: The writings of a man facing his own mortality with faith, hope and love

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one?

Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone? Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. Socrates Click to tweet. You want to live — but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying — and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead? The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy. I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves. Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen.

The worst thing is to lose your reason for living. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is just a passing shadow of a cloud. Yann Martel Life of Pi. Love never dies a natural death. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. Die happily and look forward to taking up a new and better form. Like the sun, only when you set in the west can you rise in the east.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid. Langston Hughes Click to tweet. Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved? It is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

Man always thinks about the past before he dies, as if he were frantically searching for proof that he truly lived. It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment. Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal. Thomas Moore Click to tweet. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy. I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge — myth is more potent than history — dreams are more powerful than facts — hope always triumphs over experience — laughter is the cure for grief — love is stronger than death.

The source of sorrows lies not in leaving life, but in leaving that which gives it meaning. Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive. Charlotte Bronte Click to tweet. She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. One cannot get through life without pain… What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them. No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning. Grieving is not weakness nor absence of faith.

Grieving is as natural as crying when you are hurt, sleeping when you are tired or sneezing when your nose itches. The only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground. The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created. When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know.

When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason. The only way to take sorrow out of death is to take love out of life.

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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. George Santayana Click to tweet. Because life is fragile and death inevitable, we must make the most of each day. How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind? When death overtakes us, all that we have is left to others; all that we are we take with us. Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life. Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

When those you love die, the best you can do is honor their spirit for as long as you live. People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.

It is as though they were traveling abroad. Carve your name on hearts , not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. Thomas Campbell Click to tweet. To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches.

To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back. Marcus Aurelius Click to tweet. These births and deaths are changes in nature which we are mistaking for changes in us. Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. There is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. We must constantly remind ourselves that we are eternity, infinite, beyond birth and death. Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death!

It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life to us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility. And so we will believe in our even a hundred times more worthy of their attention. For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain. Preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. Thinking about death clarifies your life. The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. Nathaniel Branden Click to tweet.

Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified. Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying. If you are mindful of death, it will not come as a surprise-you will not be anxious.

You will feel that death is merely like changing clothes. Consequently, at that point you will be able to maintain your calmness of mind. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.

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Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct. Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects? Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love… Rainer Maria Rilke. Franz Kafka Click to tweet. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.

One regret dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough. The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. Dying is like coming to the end of a long novel — you only regret it if the ride was enjoyable and left you wanting more. Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves — regret for the past and fear of the future. Life will undertake to separate us, and we must each set off in search of our own path, our own destiny or our own way of facing death.

People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. If I can see pain in your eyes, then share with me your tears. If I can see joy in your eyes, then share with me your smile. I think death is equally terrible for everyone. But do not fear it either. There cannot be life without death, it is inescapable. It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more. Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.

Tecumseh Click to tweet. You are facing death and danger and competition, but at any moment, you can decide to have a fearless mindset. To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not. For it is to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessings of human beings.

And yet people fear it as if they knew for certain it is the greatest evil. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead.

So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective. Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them. Top Five Regrets of the Dying. There is an afterlife. I am convinced of this. Paulo Coelho Click to tweet. If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever. I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.

But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end. There is existence without limitation; there is continuity without a starting point. Death is as sure for that which is born, as birth for that which is dead.

Therefore grieve not for what is inevitable. The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting. Alda Merini Click to tweet.

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For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. Radioactive decay plays a much larger role in The World Set Free This book contains what is surely his biggest prophetic "hit", with the first description of a nuclear weapon. The rate of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the total amount released is huge.

Wells's novel revolves around an unspecified invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosives—but which "continue to explode" for days on end. Wells also wrote non-fiction. When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled, "An Experiment in Prophecy", and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work.

It offered the immediate political message of the privileged sections of society continuing to bar capable men from other classes from advancement until war would force a need to employ those most able, rather than the traditional upper classes, as leaders. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year , the book is interesting both for its hits trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of populations from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism , and the existence of a European Union and its misses he did not expect successful aircraft before , and averred that "my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea".

His bestselling two-volume work, The Outline of History , began a new era of popularised world history. It received a mixed critical response from professional historians. Many other authors followed with "Outlines" of their own in other subjects. From quite early in Wells's career, he sought a better way to organise society and wrote a number of Utopian novels.

The first of these was A Modern Utopia , which shows a worldwide utopia with "no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all"; [60] two travellers from our world fall into its alternate history. The others usually begin with the world rushing to catastrophe, until people realise a better way of living: This depicted, all too accurately, the impending World War , with cities being destroyed by aerial bombs. Men Like Gods is also a utopian novel. Wells in this period was regarded as an enormously influential figure; the critic Malcolm Cowley stated: Wells contemplates the ideas of nature and nurture and questions humanity in books such as The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Not all his scientific romances ended in a Utopia, and Wells also wrote a dystopian novel, When the Sleeper Wakes , rewritten as The Sleeper Awakes , , which pictures a future society where the classes have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected unsuccessfully into human beings, eventually returns to England; like Gulliver on his return from the Houyhnhnms , he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilised beasts, slowly reverting to their animal natures.

Wells also wrote the preface for the first edition of W. Barbellion 's diaries, The Journal of a Disappointed Man , published in Since "Barbellion" was the real author's pen name , many reviewers believed Wells to have been the true author of the Journal ; Wells always denied this, despite being full of praise for the diaries. In , a Canadian teacher and writer Florence Deeks unsuccessfully sued Wells for infringement of copyright and breach of trust, claiming that much of The Outline of History had been plagiarised from her unpublished manuscript, [65] The Web of the World's Romance , which had spent nearly nine months in the hands of Wells's Canadian publisher, Macmillan Canada.

Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past. This re-examines the case in relation to McKillop's book.

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While having some sympathy for Deeks, he argues that she had a weak case that was not well presented, and though she may have met with sexism from her lawyers, she received a fair trial, adding that the law applied is essentially the same law that would be applied to a similar case today i. In , Wells predicted in The Shape of Things to Come that the world war he feared would begin in January , [72] a prediction which ultimately came true four months early, in September , with the outbreak of World War II. In , he published a collection of essays on the future organisation of knowledge and education, World Brain , including the essay "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia".

Prior to , Wells's books were widely read in Germany and Austria, and most of his science fiction works had been translated shortly after publication. At a PEN conference in Ragusa , Wells refused to yield to Nazi sympathisers who demanded that the exiled author Ernst Toller be prevented from speaking.

Seeking a more structured way to play war games, Wells also wrote Floor Games followed by Little Wars , which set out rules for fighting battles with toy soldiers miniatures. After dinner, Jerome began shooting down toy soldiers with a toy cannon and Wells joined in to compete.

Wells visited Russia three times: During his second visit, he saw his old friend Maxim Gorky and with Gorky's help, met Vladimir Lenin. In his book Russia in the Shadows , Wells portrayed Russia as recovering from a total social collapse, "the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organisation. Roosevelt , Wells went to the Soviet Union and interviewed Joseph Stalin for three hours for the New Statesman magazine, which was extremely rare at that time. He told Stalin how he had seen 'the happy faces of healthy people' in contrast with his previous visit to Moscow in Stalin enjoyed the conversation and replied accordingly.

Before he left, he realized that no reform was to happen in the near future. Wells's literary reputation declined as he spent his later years promoting causes that were rejected by most of his contemporaries as well as by younger authors whom he had previously influenced. In this connection, George Orwell described Wells as "too sane to understand the modern world".

Wells had diabetes , [85] and was a co-founder in of The Diabetic Association now Diabetes UK , the leading charity for people with diabetes in the UK. During the interview, by Charles C Shaw, a KTSA radio host, Wells admitted his surprise at the widespread panic that resulted from the broadcast but acknowledged his debt to Welles for increasing sales of one of his "more obscure" titles.

Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August , aged 79, at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent's Park , London. In his preface to the edition of The War in the Air , Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: A commemorative blue plaque in his honour was installed at his home in Regent's Park in Wells called his political views socialist.

His contemporary political impact was limited, however, excluding his fiction's positivist stance on the leaps that could be made by physics towards world peace. Winston Churchill was an avid reader of Wells' books, and after they first met in they kept in touch until Wells died in His efforts regarding the League of Nations , on which he collaborated on the project with Leonard Woolf with the booklets The Idea of a League of Nations , Prolegomena to the Study of World Organization , and The Way of the League of Nations , became a disappointment as the organization turned out to be a weak one unable to prevent the Second World War, which itself occurred towards the very end of his life and only increased the pessimistic side of his nature.

Wells wrote in his book God the Invisible King that his idea of God did not draw upon the traditional religions of the world:. This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious belief of the writer. Putting the leading idea of this book very roughly, these two antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward God; the other is the Inmost God.

The first idea was perhaps developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart.



The writer would suggest that the great outline of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus. Later in the work, he aligns himself with a "renascent or modern religion Of Christianity , he said: Every believing Christian is, I am sure, my spiritual brother Of other world religions, he writes: There they are, and they have served a purpose, they have worked. Only they are not true for me to live in them. They do not work for me". The science fiction historian John Clute describes Wells as "the most important writer the genre has yet seen", and notes his work has been central to both British and American science fiction.

Beresford , [] S. Fowler Wright , [] and Naomi Mitchison , [] all drew on Wells's example. Wells was also an important influence on British science fiction of the period after the Second World War, with Arthur C. Clarke [] and Brian Aldiss [] expressing strong admiration for Wells's work. Among contemporary British science fiction writers, Stephen Baxter , Christopher Priest and Adam Roberts have all acknowledged Wells's influence on their writing; all three are Vice-Presidents of the H.

He also had a strong influence on British scientist J. Haldane gave several lectures about these topics which in turn influenced other science fiction writers. In the United States, Hugo Gernsback reprinted most of Wells's work in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories , regarding Wells's work as "texts of central importance to the self-conscious new genre". Le Guin [] all recalled being influenced by Wells's work. Sinclair Lewis 's early novels were strongly influenced by Well's realistic social novels, such as The History of Mr Polly ; Lewis would also name his first son Wells after the author.

In an interview with The Paris Review , Vladimir Nabokov described Wells as his favourite writer when he was a boy and "a great artist. In an apparent allusion to Wells's socialism and political themes, Nabokov said: Jorge Luis Borges wrote many short pieces on Wells in which he demonstrates a deep familiarity with much of Wells's work. G Wells literary papers and correspondence collection. The collection includes first editions, revisions, translations. The letters contain general family correspondence, communications from publishers, material regarding the Fabian Society, and letters from politicians and public figures, most notably George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see H. Photograph by George Charles Beresford , Political views of H. Campbell were the inaugural deceased members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame , inducted in and followed annually by fiction writers Wells and Isaac Asimov , C.

Wells — Version details — Trove". Revised 20 May The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction sf-encyclopedia. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A visionary who should be remembered for his social predictions, not just his scientific ones". Retrieved 19 March Philmus and David Y. University of California Press, , p. Longmans, Green, , p. Claeys, Gregory; Parrinder, Patrick, eds. The Buildings of England: The Works of H.

Science Fiction and Futurism: Their Terms and Ideas. Round About a Pound a Week. Some of the text is available online. A Preface to H G Wells. A History of the County of Middlesex. Retrieved 9 June Books and Writers kirjasto. Archived from the original on 22 February Proceedings of the International H. Wells Symposium, London, July Wells's The Time Machine: Retrieved 5 March Wells arrived in Woking in May Today, there is an English Heritage blue plaque displayed on the front wall of the property, which marks his period of residence.

The Last Affairs of H. Archived from the original on 21 February A Man of Parts. Wells' cartoons, a window on his second marriage, focus of new book Archives News Bureau". Retrieved 10 June The Picshuas of H. University of Illinois Press, Wells developed a theory to justify the way he wrote he was fond of theories , and these theories helped others write in similar ways.

The Island of Doctor Moreau". Retrieved 16 October A World Set Free. University of Nebraska Press. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Archived from the original on 20 May Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life. Archived from the original on 30 April Retrieved 21 September William Heinemann, , p. A Short History of the World".

Archived from the original on 19 October A Short History of the World. Comments on " , in Eric S. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction. The Island of Dr Moreau. Copyright Lawyers' Lessons from Deeks v. Supreme Court , p. The Last War Cyclone, —50". The shape of things to come: The Reception of H. Jupiter Books, , p. The World of Miniatures—An Overview. Wells, Russia in the Shadows New York: Doran, , p. Retrieved 3 June