William Shakespeare - Bishop George Berkeley - Jean-Paul Sartre - Albert Camus - Jean-Luc Godard - Marcus Aurelius - Acts 17:28 - Albert Einstein -
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 heart-ache, 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. Aye, 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. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office...’ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, III i 56-73
The be-all and the end-all. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth I vii 5, Macbeth
To be is to be perceived. Bishop George Berkeley
Being is. Being is in itself. Being is what it is. Jean-Paul Sartre
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
To be or not to be. That’s not really a question. Jean-Luc Godard
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one. Marcus Aurelius
For in him we live, and move, and have our being. Acts 17:28
Still, there are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being. Albert Einstein, letter 9th January 1939