Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Young

Young doesn’t comfort you out of grief; he startles you out of entitlement. The line pivots on a neat rhetorical trap: you’re invited to treat immortality as the obvious prize and death as the scandal, then he flips the scandal back onto existence itself. “Still seems it strange” gently mocks the reader’s metaphysical pickiness, as if the mind can accept the brute fact of being but balks at the notion of being forever. The second question is the blade: if you’re going to call something “strange,” start with the bigger impossibility.

The subtext is almost prosecutorial. Young is pressing a courtroom-style cross-examination of human expectation: you want permanence, you complain about limits, yet you’ve never explained why you deserved consciousness in the first place. That’s the religious pressure point, too. In the Christian frame of Young’s era (and especially in Night Thoughts, where he broods on death and salvation), “miracle” isn’t a vague compliment; it’s a claim about dependency. Life is not self-authorizing. It’s granted, precarious, and already extravagant.

The last phrase, “and that no more,” is austerity as persuasion. No extra metaphysics, no lyrical padding, just a hard stop that refuses to turn wonder into a system. It’s an anti-speculation move: accept the miracle of being alive without demanding the bonus feature of eternity on your own terms. Young’s intent is moral recalibration, using paradox and clipped finality to make humility feel like the only intellectually honest posture.