Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was a such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.
When I believed the Non-Reductionist View, I also cared more about my inevitable death. After my death, there will no one living who will be me. I can now redescribe this fact. Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. Some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
It is clear that ethics cannot be stated.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
6.44
Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical.
Viewing the world sub specie aeterni is viewing it as a—limited—whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling.
[...]
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions were answered, the problems of life would remain completely untouched. To be sure, not a single question would then be left; and precisely this is the answer.
6.521 The solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem. (Is this not the reason why those to whom the meaning of life became clear after prolonged doubt, could not then say in what this meaning consisted?)
6.522 There is, though, the ineffable. This shows itself, it is the mystical.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus