Life & Mortality Quote by Edward Young

Young’s line flips the expected villain. Death isn’t the real terror, he argues; it’s living that unnerves us more. The phrasing is almost legalistic in its economy - “Less base” sounds like a moral grading, as if he’s weighing two fears on a scale and finding one more ignoble. Fear of death can look noble, even rational: an instinct dressed up as philosophy. Fear of life, though, is “base” because it implicates the self. It’s not nature’s inevitability we dread, but the daily exposure of choice, failure, desire, and responsibility.

That’s the subtext: death is a convenient screen onto which we project anxieties we’d rather not name. To fear death is to fear a single event; to fear life is to fear the ongoing project of being a person - keeping promises, sustaining meaning, tolerating uncertainty. Young, a major voice in the 18th-century “graveyard” tradition, wrote in a culture where Christian meditation on mortality was common currency, yet also one increasingly shaped by modern individuality and social performance. In that environment, death becomes both sermon material and psychological alibi.

The line works because it shames without sermonizing. It treats “fear of death” as the respectable mask and “fear of life” as the embarrassing truth underneath. Young isn’t merely urging bravery; he’s diagnosing avoidance. If you can admit the real fear is life, you can’t outsource the solution to fate or theology. You have to live differently.