Maria

“Dying people lie too. Wish they'd worked less, been nicer, opened orphanages for kittens. If you really want to do something, you do it. You don't save it for a sound bite.”
― House MD

“There's no such thing! Our bodies break down, sometimes when we're 90, sometimes before we're even born, but it always happens and there's never any dignity in it! I don't care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass... it's always ugly - ALWAYS! You can live with dignity; you can't die with it.”
― Gregory House, M.D.

“Here we have the view of body and soul best known from Plato, but heavily Stoicized.58 The divine spirit is trapped in the dark prison of the body, which hinders and damages it. After death, the spiritual evils and plagues generated by the body do not disappear. On the contrary, necessarily (emphatically: “it is deeply necessary,” penitusque necesse est) the evils have become solidly ingrained in the soul because of its long association with the body (multa diu concreta modis inolescere miris; 6.736–38). They can be removed only through painful purging in the afterlife.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality. Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that’s the visible world around us. In Socrates’s and Plato’s terms, it’s the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world of Being, which is divine, “the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless,” just as Socrates told visitors in his prison cell.10 Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people—indeed, for all but a very few people—that bridge has been washed out.”
― Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization