Thursday, July 15, 2010

Suicide - christiansquoting.org.uk

Samson crushed himself and his enemies to death beneath the ruins of a building. He can only be excused on the grounds that the Spirit of the Lord, who wrought miracles through him, had bidden him to do so. But, apart from such men excepted by the command of a just law in general or of God, the very Source of justice, in a special case, any one who kills a human being, himself or another, is guilty of murder.
Augustine, City of God, Book 1, Chapter 21, Image Books, Doubleday,1958

It is significant that in Holy Scripture no passage can be found enjoining or permitting suicide either in order to hasten our entry into immortality or to void or avoid temporal evils. God's command, "thou shalt not kill," is to be taken as forbidding self-destruction --. Augustine, City of God, Chapter 20

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. -- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1955)

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
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. Act i. Sc.2

Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.-- H.L. Mencken

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