Quotations about Death God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled. ~Author Unknown All say, How hard it is that we have to die - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live. ~Mark Twain Im not afraid of death. Its the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life. ~Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon, 1929 All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing. ~Maurice Maeterlinck To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead. ~Samuel Butler Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever. ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Gaily I lived as ease and nature taught, And spent my little life without a thought, And am amazed that Death, that tyrant grim, Should think of me, who never thought of him. ~René Francois Regnier The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. ~Mark Twain We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death. ~David Sarnoff Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. ~Francis Bacon, Essays If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isnt going to be much fun. ~From the television show Roseanne Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live. ~Henry Van Dyke He who doesnt fear death dies only once. ~Giovanni Falcone People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad. ~Marcel Proust Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me. The Carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality ~Emily Dickinson A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man. ~Percival Arland Ussher The idea is to die young as late as possible. ~Ashley Montagu Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it. ~Lord Byron No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow. ~Euripides Boy, when youre dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when youre dead? Nobody. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1945 While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. ~Leonardo Da Vinci Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. ~Alice Walker I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived. ~Willa Cather Death is a distant rumor to the young. ~Andrew A. Rooney A mans dying is more the survivors affair than his own. ~Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain There are so many little dyings that it doesnt matter which of them is death. ~Kenneth Patchen If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death. ~Charles Sanders Peirce Death, the sable smoke where vanishes the flame. ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harolds Pilgrimage God himself took a day to rest in, and a good mans grave is his Sabbath. ~John Donne The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity. ~Seneca Years, following years, steal something every day; At last they steal us from ourselves away. ~Horace Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life. ~Albert Einstein Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. ~Socrates In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight.... Not people die but worlds die in them. ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko, People Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go. ~Jean de La Fontaine Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time. ~Attributed to George Carlin As oer the stormy sea of human Life We sail, until our anchord spirits rest In the far haven of Eternity,... ~Robert Montgomery, A Universal Prayer, A Universal Prayer; Death; A Vision of Heaven; and A Vision of Hell; &c. &c., 1829 Death does not wait to see if things are done or not done. ~Kularnava Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death. ~Erik H. Erikson Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. ~Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men. ~Herodotus We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. ~Marcel Proust Thou art not dead! Thou art the whole Of life that quickens in the sod. ~Charles Hanson Towne Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation. ~Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. ~Madame de Stael From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. ~Edvard Munch Theres nothing certain in a mans life except this: That he must lose it. ~Aeschylus, Agamemnon Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. ~Norman Cousins The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotics Notebook, 1960 Let life be as beautiful as summer flowers And death as beautiful as autumn leaves. ~Rabindranath Tagore Death is a debt we all must pay. ~Euripides They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person. ~Arthur Schopenhauer He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery People living deeply have no fear of death. ~Anaiïs Nin, Diary, 1967 When I think of ages past That have floated down the stream Of life and love and death, I feel how free it makes us To pass away. ~Rabindranath Tagore To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of ones own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in. ~George Bernard Shaw If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever. ~The Crow, written by James OBarr, David J. Schow, and John Shirley, 1994 I knew a man who once said, death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back. ~Gladiator, written by David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson, 2000 Our birth is nothing but our death begun. ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts I want a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant clergyman. I want to hedge my bets. ~Wilson Mizner No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well. ~Plato For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? ~Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet (Thanks, Roxalanne) Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor. ~Homer, Iliad Death is the surest calculation that can be made. ~Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter Suicide is mans way of telling God, You cant fire me - I quit. ~Bill Maher, on Politically Incorrect, 1995 Suicide is... the sincerest form of criticism life gets. ~Wilfred Sheed, The Good Word, 1978 After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. ~J.K. Rowling You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. ~The Epic of Gilgamesh Death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits. ~John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi My soul is full of whispered song; My blindness is my sight; The shadows that I feared so long Are all alive with light. ~Alice Cary, Dying Hymn God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality. ~Jacques Rigaut, Pensées Embalm, v.: To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbors lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and the rose are languishing for a nibble at his glutaeus maximus. ~Ambrose Bierce He first deceasd; She for a little trid To live without him: likd it not, and did. ~Henry Worton The goal of all life is death. ~Sigmund Freud I sing of Death; yet soon, perchance may be A dweller in the tomb. But twenty years Have witherd, since my pilgrimage began, And I look back upon my boyish days With mournful joy; as musing wandrers do, With eye reverted, from some lofty hill, Upon the bright and peaceful vale below.— Oh! let me live, until the fires that feed My soul, have workd themselves away, and then, Eternal Spirit, take me to Thy home! For when a child, I shaped inspiring dreams, And nourishd aspirations that awoke Beautiful feelings flowing from the face Of Nature; from a child, I learnd to reap A harvest of sweet thoughts for future years. ~Robert Montgomery, Death, A Universal Prayer; Death; A Vision of Heaven; and A Vision of Hell; &c. &c., 1829 Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death! ~E.M. Cioran In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them. ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko Death is a release from the impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and the hard service of the flesh. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations For death, Now I know, is that first breath Which our souls draw when we enter Life, which is of all life center. ~Edwin Arnold And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.... And as to you corpse, I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips — I reach to the polished breasts of melons. And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. ~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. ~H.L. Mencken Oh, for the time when I shall sleep Without identity. ~Emily Bronte The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without. ~Quoted in Elbert Hubbard, The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, 1907; often modernized as The graveyards are full of indispensable men. (Thanks, Garson OToole of quoteinvestigator!) Into the winters gray delight, Into the summers golden dream, Holy and high and impartial, Death, the mother of Life, Mingles all men for ever. ~William Ernest Henley, XIV: Ave, Caesar!, In Hospital And they die an equal death - the idler and the man of mighty deeds. ~Homer, Iliad Name me no names for my disease, With uninforming breath; I tell you I am none of these, But homesick unto death. ~Witter Bynner, The Patient to the Doctors Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident - It is as common as life. ~Henry David Thoreau, 11 March 1842, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson Someday Ill be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow, Serenaded by a stray bird or two. Kings and commoners end up the same, No more enduring than last nights dream. ~Ryokan To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. ~C.G. Jung Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure. ~Mortimer Collins Death is patiently making my mask as I sleep. Each morning I awake to discover in the corners of my eyes the small tears of his wax. ~Philip Dow Immortality—dazzling idea! who first imagined thee! Was it some jolly burgher of Nuremburg, who with night-cap on his head, and white clay pipe in mouth, sat on some pleasant summer evening before his door, and reflected in all his comfort, that it would be right pleasant, if, with unextinguishable pipe, and endless breath, he could thus vegetate onwards for a blessed eternity? Or was it a lover, who in the arms of his loved one, thought the immortality-thought, and that because he could think and feel naught beside!—Love! Immortality! ~Heinrich Heine, The Hartz Journey (1824), Pictures of Travel, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, 1855 For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. ~William Penn But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world. ~Tim OBrien, The Things They Carried Paradise - I see flowers from the cottage where I lie. ~Yaitsus death poem, 1807 Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed. ~Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death. ~Leonardo da Vinci On a large enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club God made death so wed know when to stop. ~Steven Stiles Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. ~Albert Einstein There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death. ~Harvey Cushing A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist. ~Stewart Alsop I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death. ~Thomas Browne, An Essay on Death The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that youll grow out of it. ~Doris Day Well, right now... Im not dead. But when I am, its like... I dont know, I guess its like being inside a book that nobodys reading.... An old one. Its up on a library shelf, so youre safe and everything, but the book hasnt been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebodyll pick it up and start reading. ~Tim OBrien, The Things They Carried Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees. ~J.J. Furnas Oh, may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again. ~George Eliot, The Choir Invisible Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly. ~Elbert Hubbard I intend to live forever. So far, so good. ~Steven Wright I wouldnt mind dying - its the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me. ~R. Geis Anyhow, its not so bad.... I mean, when youre dead, you just have to be yourself. ~Tim OBrien, The Things They Carried You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper. ~Robert Alton Harris Death is lifes way of telling you youre fired. ~Author Unknown Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life. ~John Muir
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 15:21:33 +0000
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