Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessStoic idea

Memento mori is Latin for “remember that you must die”. For centuries the phrase has reminded people that their time is limited: Stoic philosophers turned it into a regular practice, and painters filled their pictures with skulls, hourglasses and burnt-down candles to make the same point.

Latin saying

Philosophy

The story behind the card

The idea is older than the Latin phrase. The Stoic philosopher Seneca filled his letters with advice to reflect on death. Epictetus told his students that when they kissed a child or a friend they should remember that person was mortal, just as, he said, someone stood behind a Roman general during his triumph to remind him that he too was mortal. From the Middle Ages the theme ran through European art and tomb sculpture, from the Dance of Death, which showed skeletons leading people of every rank, to the Dutch vanitas still lifes of the 1600s, where skulls, wilting flowers and soap bubbles sit among fine objects. Psychologists have tested whether thinking about death makes life feel more precious: in a 2011 study, people who vividly imagined their own death for a few minutes afterwards reported more gratitude than a comparison group.

Türkçe oku
Memento mori, Latincede “öleceğini hatırla” demektir. Bu söz yüzyıllardır ömrün sınırlı olduğunu unutmamak için kullanılır: Stoacı filozoflar onu düzenli bir düşünme alıştırmasına dönüştürdü, ressamlar da aynı düşünceyi kafatasları, kum saatleri ve dibine kadar yanmış mumlarla resimlerine taşıdı.
Latince söz

Fikir, Latince sözden daha eskidir. Stoacı filozof Seneca'nın mektupları ölüm üzerine düşünme öğütleriyle doludur. Epiktetos da öğrencilerine, çocuklarını ya da dostlarını öperken onların ölümlü olduğunu hatırlamalarını söyler. Ona göre bu, zafer alayında Romalı komutanın arkasında durup ona da ölümlü olduğunu hatırlatan kişinin yaptığı işe benzer. Orta Çağ'dan itibaren bu tema Avrupa sanatına ve mezar heykellerine yayıldı: Her sınıftan insanı iskeletlerin önüne katıp götürdüğü Ölüm Dansı resimlerinden, kafataslarının, solan çiçeklerin ve sabun köpüklerinin değerli eşyalar arasında durduğu 1600'lerin Hollanda vanitas natürmortlarına kadar. Psikologlar, ölümü düşünmenin hayatı daha değerli hissettirip hissettirmediğini de sınadı: 2011'de yayımlanan bir çalışmada, birkaç dakika boyunca kendi ölümünü canlı biçimde hayal eden katılımcılar, karşılaştırma grubuna göre daha çok şükran duyduklarını bildirdi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Memento mori
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 archiveIn A Theory of Justice (1971), the American philosopher John Rawls asked what rules for society you would choose from behind a “veil of ignorance”: not knowing whether you would be rich or poor, talented or not, healthy or sick, or even what you would believe.Read next →