Fruitless and chance gift, my breath,
Why were you given to me,
And why were you condemned to death
By inscrutable destiny?
Who fashioned brain and eye and limb
From nothingness, and gave
My spirit an immortal dream
And knowledge of the grave?
I weep because the only sound
Is life's monotonous,
Sad, aimless, endless lull, the ground-
Swell of the universe.
~Alexander Pushkin

If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it. ~Montaigne

Bodily offspring I do not leave, but mental offspring I do. Well, my books do not have to be sent to school and college and then insist on going into the Church or take to drinking or marry their mother's maid. ~Samuel Butler

But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions; not with yourself but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them not what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give me, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtle and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not. ~RW Emerson