To Be Or Not To Be Is The Question?

Question

Where did I get this" quote "and what does it mean?

Answer 1

The play Macbeth written by William Shakespeare, it is pondering the thought of whether you should live (be) or die (not be)

Answer 2

80% of humanity, the religious folks, don't need to ask the meaning of life, the church tells them....the supernatural explanation. But the rest of us can't swallow religious dogma, because there's no evidence. Nobody can prove that there life after death, that people are tortured or rewarded after life or that there's invisible spirits running around.

I've come to two conclusions recently:

1. Life has no meaning
2. Life has a million meanings.

First, there's a certainty that death and annihilation awaits not only you, but the Earth in general. It's an astonomical certainty that our sun will supernova and leave the earth a burnt crisp, not to mention all the other extinction level events around the corner.

Second, the million things that give us meaning are the pleasurable experiences we can conjure up during the short period we are here on the earth, in the form of the relationships we have with our kids and other people, and the 'housekeeping' types of purposes. What i mean by that are the curing disease, ending hunger, improving literacy, reducing crime, preventing war, helping other kinds of things.

So the bottom line is, we only have a temporary meaning to life, to reduce pain and increase pleasure, other than that everything is lost to oblivion.


To be or not to be? "To be" is temporary and "not to be" is inevitable.....

Answer 3

"To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep:
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,--'t is a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action."
--William Shakespeare

The above is fairly self explanitory.

Answer 4

Actually, it's not from MacBeth... It's from the Shakesperean play "Hamlet." Act III, scene 1, lines 58-90... That's the whole soliloqy.

Hamlet is really saying "to live or not to live" and then he goes on about asking himself if it's more honorable to suffer through life or to commit suicide.

He then decides that not knowing what it's like to die or if there is an afterlife is what keeps most people from killing themselves.

Answer 5

I see it as an existential crisis.Whether to be a warrior in life as we must all do to an extent and stay...or to let yourself go and die because of the supposed futility of it all.For me,it seems like the most important question in life.

Answer 6

Shakespear

it is an illustration of nombrilistic agonizing over the meaninglessness of one's life

the real question is "given that I am, what should I do?"

Answer 7

God has given us a deposit. The original question is if human can give this deposit back.

Answer 8

TB or not TB, that is congestion!

Answer 9

2B or not 2B, that is the pencil.