Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessQuote

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law and not an accident.

Henry David Thoreau, letter to Emerson, 1842

Philosophy

The story behind the card

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the American writer later famous for Walden, wrote this on 11 March 1842 to his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both men were grieving. In January Thoreau's older brother John had died in his arms of tetanus, an infection that locks the muscles, after a small cut. Weeks later Emerson's five-year-old son Waldo died of scarlet fever. Thoreau was living in the Emerson household at the time and was close to the boy. The letter goes on: “It is as common as life.”

Türkçe oku
Ölüm, bir kaza değil de bir yasa olarak görüldüğünde güzeldir.
Henry David Thoreau, Emerson'a mektup, 1842

Sonradan Walden kitabıyla ünlenecek Amerikalı yazar Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), bu satırları 11 Mart 1842'de dostu ve akıl hocası Ralph Waldo Emerson'a yazdı. İkisi de yastaydı. Ocak ayında Thoreau'nun ağabeyi John, küçük bir kesikten kaptığı ve kasları kilitleyen bir enfeksiyon olan tetanoz yüzünden kardeşinin kollarında ölmüştü. Birkaç hafta sonra Emerson'ın beş yaşındaki oğlu Waldo da kızıldan öldü. Thoreau o sırada Emerson'ların evinde yaşıyordu ve çocuğa çok bağlıydı. Mektup şöyle sürer: “Ölüm, hayat kadar olağandır.”

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Henry David Thoreau
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DrivePhilosophy

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

The saying comes from chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, the classic of Taoist philosophy traditionally credited to the sage Laozi; its oldest surviving copies date from around 300 BC. Literally, a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet; the li is a Chinese measure of distance, today half a kilometre. The same chapter notes that a tree too thick to hug grows from a tiny shoot: great things start small, and are best dealt with while they are still small.

Chinese, Daoist ProverbRead card
StillnessLiterature

The wound is where the light enters you.

The sentence condenses lines by Coleman Barks, the American poet whose free versions made Rumi a bestseller in English; Barks did not read Persian and reworked scholarly translations. His poem “Childhood Friends” (1990) urges the reader to keep looking at “the bandaged place”, where the light enters. It draws on the Masnavi of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic of Konya, who tells the wounded not to turn away from the plaster a spiritual guide lays on them: the healing comes from its light, not from themselves.

Attributed to Rumi; exact English sentence not matched to a standard textRead card
DrivePhilosophy

The tongue has no bones, but it can break hearts.

The older form of this proverb says the tongue has no bones, yet it breaks bones: words can hurt as much as blows. An Italian-English dictionary of 1760 gives it as “La lingua non ha osso, e osso fa rompere”; Greek has it too, and the Ottoman statesman and scholar Ahmed Vefik Pasha recorded “Dilin kemiği yok, kemiği kırar” in his 19th-century collection of Turkish proverbs. Swahili says simply “Ulimi hauna mfupa”, the tongue has no bone. The ending about hearts seems to be a later English variant.

Persian, Turkish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card
StillnessLiterature

The rose's lover must endure the thorn.

The Turkish Language Association's dictionary explains that people put up with the troubles that come with someone, or some work, they love. The rose and its thorn are an old pair in Turkish and Persian poetry; in classical Ottoman verse the nightingale longs for the rose, and the thorn often stands for the pain of love. English has “No rose without a thorn”, as does Turkish, “Dikensiz gül olmaz”, but this proverb adds that whoever loves the rose accepts its thorn.

Turkish, Persian variants ProverbRead card
DrivePhilosophy

He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

English quotation books have called this an “Arabian proverb” since at least the 1860s; Tryon Edwards's A Dictionary of Thoughts (1891) is one, but these books give no Arabic original, so the label is best taken loosely. The idea is widely shared: good health gives people the strength to plan and to recover from setbacks. Turkish says “Her şeyin başı sağlık”, health comes first, and when a glass breaks people say “Sağlık olsun”: never mind, as long as everyone is well.

Spanish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card
Next card in the archiveLoneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.Read next →