The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

i

They are functions one of the other and if you get rid of one you must get rid of the other also.  There is birth in death and death in birth.  We are always dying and being born again.

ii

Life is the gathering of waves to a head, at death they break into a million fragments each one of which, however, is absorbed at once into the sea of life and helps to form a later generation which comes rolling on till it too breaks.

iii

What happens to you when you die?  But what happens to you when you are born?  In the one case we are born and in the other we die, but it is not possible to get much further.

iv

We commonly know that we are going to die though we do not know that we are going to be born.  But are we sure this is so?  We may have had the most gloomy forebodings on this head and forgotten all about them.  At any rate we know no more about the very end of our lives than about the very beginning.  We come up unconsciously, and go down unconsciously; and we rarely see either birth or death.  We see people, as consciousness, between the two extremes.