'Thou see'st that thy hope and thy desire to return to thy native land, and to thy old life, is like the desire of the moth for the flame, and that Man (who, ceaseless in desire, joyous in impatience, ever awaits a new spring, and thinketh that his desire is slow in its fulfilment) does not know that he expecteth but his own destruction and his end. But this expectation is the quintessence of nature, the soul of the elements, and finding itself in the soul of man, it is the desire to return from the body unto Him who made it.'
'In nature nothing exists but Force and Movement; and force is the volition of happiness, the eternal striving of the universe after final equilibrium and the Prime Mover.'
'Every part desires to be united with its whole that it may escape imperfection.'
'As the day well spent gives pleasant dreams, life well lived shall give a happy death.'
'Every evil leaves bitterness in the memory, except the greatest evil, which is death, for it destroys the memory together with the life.'
'When I thought I was learning to live, I was but learning how to die.'
'The outward necessity of nature corresponds with the outward necessity of reason: everything is reasonable, all is good, because all is necessary.'
Thus his reason justified death, the will of the Prime Mover; yet in the depth of his heart something rebelled.
Once he dreamed that he awoke in a coffin buried alive under the earth, and with desperate resolution and panting for breath he strove to raise the lid of his prison.
Next morning he told Francesco of his desire that he should lie unburied till the first signs of decomposition should show themselves. He still loved life with a blind unreasoning love, still clung to it and dreaded death as a black pit into which that day or the next he would fall with a cry of the utmost terror. All the consolations of reason, all he had said of divine necessity and the will of the Prime Mover, vanished like smoke before this shrinking of the flesh. He would have relinquished his immortality for one ray of earthly sunshine, one waft of the spring, for the perfume of expanding leaves, for a bunch of yellow flowers from the Monte Albano, where he had been a happy child.