It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

Don't fear the gods, Don't worry about death; What is good is easy to get, and What is terrible is easy to endure.

To renounce a full life and its real joys in order to avoid pain is neither Christian nor human.

It is sufficient for us that we witness their humiliation," he said. "Posterity will huzza for us."

If our suffering has a purpose, it is infinitely easier to bear than if our suffering has no purpose and no larger meaning. When a mother endures childbirth, she knows that it is leading to something life changing and glorious.

Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

He was feeling happy. It was one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhiliration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

Don't you believe it. I'll tell you what life is. It's gaol, it's not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear 'em shrieking from the upper windows- children being born. It's dying slowly.

Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.