"Every will stands on its own bottom and is various as anything whatsoever, and therefore it is hard to cite a case that can quadrate. I have mean thoughts of my own opinion. I may say in this case, diffieilius est invenire quam vincere, as Caesar said when he and his army ran about the Alps to find out a way."

"Let a will be ever so fair, a slip in form is fatal: which is a certain mischief. But if a will be fraudulent, though it is allowed to be formal, it may be set aside upon evidence and circumstances."

"Men should not sin in their graves."

"Speaking for myself, I do not look upon wills as Chinese puzzles; they no doubt do present great difficulties, but I do not feel myself the serious difficulty which other learned Judges have."

"The law has ever been watchful and jealous of wills made under religious influences, and especially so when those influences connect themselves with any individual who is the object of the testator's bounty."

"The Court is at liberty to transpose and mould clauses and words in a will so as to make the whole take effect."

"I do not intend to encumber myself with cases. Decisions upon other words something like those in question, in other wills, where the whole context of those other wills must be gone into, can afford very little assistance."

"Of all the cases which come before the Court for its decision, none can be more embarrassing and more unsatisfactory than those which arise upon the construction of wills. The Court has no real guide to enable it to arrive at a conclusion. The only things which can be called guides are certain rules which the Court has laid down, and which may be extracted from the decisions. Beyond that, the decisions are not of the slightest use. Except by adherence to those rules, there is nothing but what may, not irreverently, be called guessing as to what the words of the document can be held to mean."

"I regret exceedingly that, not only ordinary laymen, but, as it seems to me, professional men, do not understand the great difficulty there is in drawing wills, and do not bestow a little more care and pains in endeavouring to draw them in such a way as that the numerous questions which often arise on them should be avoided. I regret to say that these questions often throw a great deal of expense on parties interested under the wills, and are the cause of great heartburnings and most bitter animosities."

"I quite admit that on the question of the construction of wills relating to real property the cases have always had greater attention given to them than in the case of personalty, because land in England passes by title, and it has always been the habit of the lawyers and Judges to look with greater strictness to the reported cases where it is a question of land than where it is a question of personalty."

"There is no instance where men are so easily imposed upon, as at the time of their dying under the pretence of charity."

"This seems to me to be one of those cases in which the Court is bound to arrive at a conclusion without having any satisfactory means of arriving at it. The only guide I have is this. I am entitled to sit in the testator's chair as he wrote his own will."

"A will is often executed suddenly in a last sickness, and sometimes in the article of death . . . consequently the time of the execution is the critical moment which requires guard and protection."

"My distinction is, that in incorrect wills the Court may take liberties, but that if the words are correct they have no power to make any alteration."

"Let's choose executors and talk of wills: And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground?"

"As lawyers we must construe the will like any other document."

"In the state of languor in which dying persons generally are, their assent could be easily got to statements which they never intended to make, if they were but ingeniously interwoven with statements which were actually true by an artful person. ** R. v. Fitzgerald, Ir. Cir. R. 168, 169."

"No previous will can be treated properly as a precedent for another which is expressed in different language, and no decision on the precise words of a former will can as a general rule be of the least service in guiding the Court as to the construction of other words. Unless you can get a principle from a case which is applicable generally to other cases, the precedent is of little use."

"If we find from a will, as we do here, that a testator has used a word in a particular sense, we must give it that meaning wherever it occurs in the will. It is the same thing as if a foreign word were used—a case of which I have known. In such a case we have to get at the meaning of the word in English from an ordinary dictionary, and then whenever it occurs give it that English meaning. Of course, the dictionary must be clear; and if we cannot make out what the testator meant, then we have not got the dictionary."

"I tell my kids ... "Tell me when I'm going gaga — but all three of you had better come in, because if it's just one of you, you're out of the will."

"We must find out the meaning of the testator as well as we can."

"I do not see why, if we can tell what a man intends, and can give effect to his intention as expressed, we should be driven out of it by other cases or decisions in other cases. I always protest against anything of the sort."

"Let it not be supposed that there is no hope for this class – the sane deliberate suicide. If, bearing steadfastly his cross, he suffers patiently his punishment, striving against carnal appetites still alive in him, in all their intensity, though, of course, each in proportion to the degree to which it had been indulged in earth-life – if, we say, he bears this humbly, never allowing himself to be tempted here or there into unlawful gratifications of unholy desires – then when his fated death-hour strikes, his four higher principles reunite, and, in the final separation that then ensues, it may well be that all may be well with him, and that he passes on to the gestation period and its subsequent developments."

"And we must remember that thoughts and motives are material, and at times marvelously potent material, forces, an we may then begin to comprehend why the [98] hero, sacrificing his life on pure altruistic grounds, sinks as his life-blood ebbs way into a sweet dream, wherein All that he wishes and all that he loves Come smiling round his sunny way, only to wake into active or objective consciousness when reborn in the Region of Happiness, while the poor unhappy and misguided mortal who, seeking to elude fate, selfishly loosens the silver string and breaks the golden bowl, finds himself terribly alive and awake, instinct with all the evil cravings and desires that embittered his world-life, without a body in which to gratify these, and capable of only such partial alleviation as is possible by more or less vicarious gratification, and this only at the cost of the ultimate complete rupture with his sixth and seventh principles, and consequent ultimate annihilation after, alas! prolonged periods of suffering."

"In the victim’s case the natural hour of death was anticipated accidentally, while in that of the suicide death is brought on voluntarily and with a full and deliberate knowledge of its immediate consequences. Thus a man who causes his death in a fit of temporary insanity is not a felo de se, to the great grief and often trouble of the Life Insurance Companies. Nor is he left a prey to the temptations of the Kāmaloka, but falls asleep like any other victim... The population of Kāmaloka is thus recruited with a peculiarly dangerous element by all the acts of violence, legal and illegal, which wrench the physical body from the soul and send the latter into Kāmaloka clad in the desire body, throbbing with pulses of hatred, passion, emotion, palpitating with longings for revenge, with un-satiated lusts."

"It's better to burn out than to fade away."

"Britannia's shame! There took her gloomy flight, On wing impetuous, a black sullen soul… Less base the fear of death than fear of life. O Britain! infamous for suicide."

"Another class of disembodied entities includes those whose lives on earth have been prematurely cut short, by their own act, the act of others, or by accident. Their fate in Kāmaloka depends on the conditions which surrounded their out-goings from earthly life, for not all suicides are guilty of felo de se, and the measure of responsibility may vary within very wide limits. The condition of such has been thus described:"

"A murderer in the body is not a pleasant member of society, but a murderer suddenly expelled from the body is a far more dangerous entity; society may protect itself against the first, but in its present state of ignorance it is defenceless as against the second."

"Suicide is self-expression."

"For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from thinking to awareness. I was still in the men’s room, but alone now, looking at my face in the mirror. At that moment of detachment from my mind, I laughed out loud....“Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.” That’s what the laughter seemed to be saying. But it was only a glimpse, very quickly to be forgotten. I would spend the next three years in anxiety and depression, completely identified with my mind. I had to get close to suicide before awareness returned, and then it was much more than a glimpse. I became free of compulsive thinking and of the false, mindmade “I.” p. 23"

"The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week."

"One important worker task is colony defense. In some bees, ants, and wasps, the worker sting has backward-pointing barbs that lodge in an at- tacker’s flesh. The sting then detaches (“sting autotomy”) from the worker, who dies (Hermann 1984)."

"Suicides, although not wholly dissevered from their...[higher] principles... to the day when they would have died a natural death, are separated from their higher principles by a gulf... whereas in cases of accidental death the higher and the lower groups actually attract each other... These, whether suicides or killed by accident, can communicate with those in earth-life, but much to their own injury... The good and innocent sleep happily till the life-period is over. But where the victim of an accident is depraved and gross, his fate is a sad one. Unhappy shades, if sinful and sensual, they wander about (not shells, for their connection with their two higher principles is not quite broken) until their death hour comes."

"The rule is that a person who dies a natural death will remain from “a few hours to several short years” within the earth’s attraction – i. e., the Kāmaloka. But exceptions are the cases of suicides and those who die a violent death in general. Hence, one... who was destined to live, say, eighty or ninety years – but who either killed himself or was killed by some accident, let us suppose at the age of twenty – would have to pass in the Kāmaloka not “a few years”, but in this case sixty or seventy years... Premature death brought on by vicious courses, by over-study, or by voluntary sacrifice for some great cause, will bring about delay in Kāmaloka, but the state of the disembodied entity will depend on the motive that cut short the life."

"To those of us who have suffered severe depression - myself included - this general unawareness of how relentlessly the disease can generate an urge to self-destruction seems widespread; the problem badly needs illumination. What is saddening about Primo Levi's death is the suspicion that his way of dying was not inevitable and that with proper care he might have been rescued from the abyss. I find it difficult not to believe that if Mr Levi had been under capable hospital attention, sequestered from the unbearable daily world in a setting where he would have been safe from his self-destructive urge, and where time would have permitted the storm raging in his brain to calm itself and die away, he would be among us now."

"I have little use for the past and rarely think about it; however, I would briefly like to tell you how I came to be a spiritual teacher and how this book came into existence. Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else's life.... What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live. “I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”... BR>When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Introduction"

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

"He that cuts off twenty years of life Cuts off so many years of fearing death."

"Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong; Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat: Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself."

"You ever-gentle gods, take my breath from me; Let not my worser spirit tempt me again To die before you please!"

"To be, or not to be,—that is the question:— Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?—To die, to sleep,— No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to,—'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;— To sleep, perchance to dream:—ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death,— The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns,—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know naught of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action."

"Against self-slaughter There is a prohibition so divine That cravens my weak hand."

"The more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves, more than their even Christian."

"Suicide is often a failure of community, and claiming it as inevitable is a defense against that failure."

"Suicide among service members, veterans, and their families is a public health and national security crisis. In 2019 alone, the Department of Veterans Affairs reported that 6,261 veterans died by suicide. The Department of Defense reported 580 suicide deaths among Active Components, Reserve, and National Guard service members in 2020; and 202 suicide deaths among military family members in 2019.ii While suicide in the general population has been increasing, the rate among service members and veterans remains too high despite ongoing effort to reduce suicide through the implementation of federal policies, programs, and practices. For more than a decade, the suicide rates have been higher and have risen faster among veterans as compared to non-veterans. Women veterans die by suicide at almost twice the rate than nonveteran women, and veterans ages 18-34 have a suicide rate almost three times higher than nonveterans the same age."

"Well, I wasn't sure whether I was ever going to be able to do anything again. When we lost Tommy on December 31 of 2020, my chief of staff, Julie Tagen, who came over to the house, said that, you know, just for hours I just sat in one seat. And I was just repeating over and over, I've lost my son. My life is over. My life is over. And that pretty well captures my state of mind at the time. And he had - Speaker Pelosi, I see in hindsight, threw me a lifeline because she reached out to me. And she said, we need you. And the country needs you. So I was forced to galvanize all of my love for Tommy and my daughters, Hannah and Tabitha, and my wife, Sarah, and our family and our country, and to throw myself into the trial to make the case that Donald Trump had incited this violent insurrection and effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election."