“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
Mark Twain
Mark Twain
> We are so high that we do not have to explain anything to anybody, either in this world or in the next. Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born–a hundred million years–and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.
Look at his Autobiography for more context.
I retried on Google Books using quotes around a sentence and it finds [2] and [3]. I don't have access to these so I cannot check, if some can we could clarify part of the mistery. Project Gutenberg on Mark Twain [4]?
DDG find the oldest attributed to Mark Twain in 2004 [5].
Trying
[1] https://www.docdroid.net/XGv3aLm/the-god-delusion-pdf
[2] https://www.google.com.ar/books/edition/Mark_Twain_on_Religi... (Mark Twain 1906/2007 based on page results)
[3] https://www.google.com.ar/books/edition/The_Five_Boons_of_Li... (1902) (checked in Kindle search and it is not there, Google failed!).
[4] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/53 trying site:gutenberg.org "I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born" doesn't give any result.
[5] https://sorcerers.net/community/threads/high-level-abilities...
He’s not buying it because death is loss for the subject of the potential good experiences they would have had in life, which must postdate being born. If I understand him correctly, that is.
I’m not buying that argument either, because the subject is not able to experience loss - only anticipation of loss - whereas non-dead friends and family get the real thing. Death is only bad for those who love or need us.
PS Happy New Year