Ars Moriendi Quotes

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.

The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. Ars moriendi as ars vivendi: The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.

ars moriendi

Like Thomas More before her, another political heavyweight in whose destruction Cromwell had been intimately involved, Anne Boleyn had embraced the sixteenth century’s veneration for the ars moriendi—the art of dying. The veil between life and death was made permeable by the teachings of Christianity.

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. I had read that somewhere in my postgraduate days and remembered it as I sat at his side. Jason died as he had lived, in the heroic pursuit of understanding. His gift to the world would be the fruits of that understanding, not hoarded but freely distributed.

Yvette practised the ars moriendi; I had long known that she would. The day before she died, her spirit intact, she listened with a look of beatitude on her simplified face to the story that I had brought with me from Leamington Spa, where I had just moved, to the Brighton hospice, where she lay in a room that formed a hard crystal of light, exposed to the raucous and merciless spring. It was a love story, and when I had finished relating it to her, and had sat quietly with her for several hours, she finally spoke out of the suffused silence, ‘You are now going to leave.’ Then, in her own way, she gave me her blessing: ‘You know how I feel. You know how I feel. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. All the very best. All the very best.’ I bent over her and kissed her on the lips several times, her lips reaching mine each time before mine touched hers.