“There are but three events in a man's life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.”

“Christ was born a man for me,
for me he died -
Unless I become God
through Him,
His birth is mocked
His death denied”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

“The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

“He also said we should carve in the year and place where I was born, but I said no. As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last.”

Frederick Buechner book Godric

“I shall tell you how my Guru’s Guru died. After announcing that his end was nearing, he stopped eating, without changing the routine of his daily life. On the eleventh day, at prayer time he was singing and clapping vigorously and suddenly died! Just like that, between two movements, like a blown out candle. Everybody dies as he lives. I am not afraid of death, because I am not afraid of life. I live a happy life and shall die a happy death. Misery is to be born, not to die. All depends how you look at it.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

“I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

“What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

“We admitted that everything living is born of the dead. For if the soul existed before birth, and in coming to life and being born can be born only from death and dying, must she not after death continue to exist, since she has to be born again?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher