[00:11.38]Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.
[00:20.66]There was a time when we were not: this gives me no concern -
[00:26.01]why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
[00:31.59]I have no wish to have been alive a hundred years ago, or in the reign of Queen Anne.
[00:37.97]Why should I regret and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence,
[00:43.92]in the reign of I cannot tell whom?
[00:47.03]To die is only to be as we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance,
[00:56.62]in contemplating this last idea. It is rather a relief and disburdening of the mind;
[01:05.44]it seems to have been a holiday time with us then; we were not called to appear upon the stage of life,
[01:12.33]to wear robes or tatters, to laugh or cry, be hooted or applauded; we had lain perdu all this while,
[01:21.75]snug out of harm’s way; and had slept out our thousands of centuries without wanting to be waked up;
[01:30.53]at peace and free from care, in a long nonage, in a sleep deeper and calmer than that of infancy,
[01:38.69]wrapped in the softest and finest dust. And the worst that we dread is, after a short fretful,
[01:46.49]feverish being, after vain hopes, and idle fears, to sink to final repose again, and forget the troubled dream of life!
