"We die only once, and for such a long time"
About this Quote
Death gets one entrance, then refuses to leave. Moliere’s line is built like a neat joke with a trapdoor: the first half sounds like stoic reassurance, the second half flips it into an almost petty complaint. “Only once” carries the comforting arithmetic of moderation; “for such a long time” punctures that comfort with the banal, inexhaustible duration of being gone. It’s wit as deflation, the kind that makes laughter feel like a nervous reflex rather than a release.
The intent isn’t to philosophize in marble. It’s to reframe mortality as an everyday indignity: not dramatic, not heroic, just interminable. That’s classic Moliere, whose theater is obsessed with the vanity of people trying to manage what can’t be managed - illness, aging, reputation, desire. The subtext: we spend our lives rehearsing control (through piety, medicine, status, romance), but death ignores our scripts. It happens once, yes, but its “long time” mocks the human instinct to bargain, to schedule, to soften the terms.
Context matters: 17th-century France is a world of religious certainty on paper and bodily fragility in practice. Epidemics, primitive medicine, and social theater (court manners, moral posturing) make death both omnipresent and publicly policed. Moliere, who famously staged hypocrisy and suffered real ill health, lands this line as a secular pinprick: not an argument against faith, but a reminder that mortality’s most obscene feature is its administrative simplicity. One death. Endless aftermath. That asymmetry is where the joke bites.
The intent isn’t to philosophize in marble. It’s to reframe mortality as an everyday indignity: not dramatic, not heroic, just interminable. That’s classic Moliere, whose theater is obsessed with the vanity of people trying to manage what can’t be managed - illness, aging, reputation, desire. The subtext: we spend our lives rehearsing control (through piety, medicine, status, romance), but death ignores our scripts. It happens once, yes, but its “long time” mocks the human instinct to bargain, to schedule, to soften the terms.
Context matters: 17th-century France is a world of religious certainty on paper and bodily fragility in practice. Epidemics, primitive medicine, and social theater (court manners, moral posturing) make death both omnipresent and publicly policed. Moliere, who famously staged hypocrisy and suffered real ill health, lands this line as a secular pinprick: not an argument against faith, but a reminder that mortality’s most obscene feature is its administrative simplicity. One death. Endless aftermath. That asymmetry is where the joke bites.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
|---|
More Quotes by Moliere
Add to List
