Quotes about death
page 36

“On this tragic day, the death of Adolf Hitler was reported - Admiral Dönitz takes over as his nominated successor. Reach Flensburg about 8. Have to drink wine for breakfast — as nothing else is available.”

William Joyce (1906–1946) British fascist and propaganda broadcaster

Peter Martland, "Lord Haw Haw: The English voice of Nazi Germany" (The National Archives, 2003), p. 301. UK National Archives KV 2/250/2, p. 55.
Diary entry, 1 May 1945.

Drink, Wine

“And I think, dear friends, if we carried with us more distinctly than we do that one simple thought that in all human joys, in all the apparently self-forgetting tenderness, of that Lord, who had a heart for every sorrow, and an ear for every complaint, and a hand open as day and full of melting charity for every need — that in every moment of that life in the boyhood, in the dawning manhood, in the maturity of His growing power — there was always present one black shadow, toward which He ever went straight with the consent of His will and the clearest eye, we should understand something more of how the life as well as the death was a sacrifice for us sinful men.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 68.

Life, Men, Understanding, Thinking

“As for an afterlife, there has been a general decline in the general acceptance of it as a certainty, and though a few rationalists may be pleased, to many people this has added a new terror to death. We are reluctant, in the main, to consider the disappearance of ourselves and consequently all we feel and know. Every man's death is, literally, the end of a world if he dies without hope. We have exchanged Gone Elsewhere for Gone Nowhere.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

People, World, Hope, Feeling

“[T]he American dream is still alive and well, thanks: Even the newest taxi driver stumbling over his English grammar knows he can truly become an American. But European Muslims can't become French or Dutch or Italian or German. Even if they qualify for a passport, they remain second-class citizens. On a good day. And they're supposed to take over the continent that's exported more death than any other?”

Ralph Peters (1952) American military officer, writer, pundit

Source: 2000s, Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century (2007), p. 334

Dreams

“Fellini has sometimes been accused of not being interested in the work of other directors but I never found this accusation to hold true. The Federico I knew was not only a voracious reader but extremely interested in hearing about international directors, most notably, Nanni Moretti, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Akira Kurosawa, David Cronenberg, Wim Wenders, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick. Clearly, part of the pleasure of discussing these directors was the stimulus for new ideas that their latest films gave him. Although we never explored Portuguese film in any depth, the films of Manoel de Oliveira and Joao César Monteiro genuinely fascinated Federico. At the urging of Mastroianni, he went to see A Divina Comédia (1991), Oliveira’s superb allegory about Western civilization, and returned enthralled. He had long been obsessed by the theme of insane asylums and Oliveira’s masterful blend of philosophy and religion appealed to him at a time in his life when such questions as death and resurrection had become pressing concerns. I do not know where or in what format Federico saw Monteiro’s Recordaçoes de Casa Amarela (1989) but it was a film he described as “deliriously eccentric, a satirical bizarrie that Bunuel would have adored."”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On Fellini’s favorite directors
Federico Fellini: Sou um Grande Mentiroso (2008)

Life, Pleasure, Religion, Idea

“Before the eighteenth century the demographic impact of the profession of medicine remained negligible. Relatively few persons could afford to pay a doctor for his often very expensive services; and for every case in which the doctor's attendance really made a difference between life and death, there were other instances in which even the best available professional services made little difference to the course of the disease, or actually hindered recovery. …Only with the eighteenth century did the situation begin to change; and it was not until after 1850 or so that the practice of medicine and the organization of medical services begin to make large-scale differences in human survival rates and population growth.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.6.

Life, Disease, Change, Personality

“If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 375

God, Idea

“Diogenes the Cynic, when a little before his death he fell into a slumber, and his physician rousing him out of it asked him whether anything ailed him, wisely answered, "Nothing, sir; only one brother anticipates another,—Sleep before Death."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Consolation to Apollonius

Sleep

“In Poland, many doctors would not undertake euthanasia due to religious beliefs. The Dutch are more pragmatic, and death is not a great taboo for them, but part of the natural turn of things.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

Tomasz Vetulani o Holandii, niskim kraju http://www.nto.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110605/REPORTAZ01/762330357, nto.pl, 5 June 2011 (in Polish)

Nature, Parting

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Section 8
Hainish Cycle, The Word for World Is Forest (1972)

God, World, Dreams, Way

“As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

Life, Dreams, Madness

“But now in this Valley of Humiliation poor Christian was hard put to it, for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul Fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back, or to stand his ground. But he considered again, that he had no Armor for his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give him greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his Darts; therefore he resolved to venture, and stand his ground. For thought he, had I no more in mine eye than the saving of my life, 'twould be the best way to stand.
So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now the Monster was hideous to behold, he was cloathed with scales like a Fish (and they are his pride) he had Wings like a Dragon, feet like a Bear, and out of his belly came Fire and Smoke, and his mouth was as the mouth of a Lion. When he was come up to Christian, he beheld him with a disdainful countenance, and thus began to question with him.
Apollyon: Whence come you, and whither are you bound?
Christian: I am come from the City of Destruction, which is the place of all evil, and am going to the City of Zion.
Apollyon: By this I perceive thou art one of my Subjects, for all that Country is mine; and I am the Prince and God of it. How is it then that thou hast run away from thy King? Were it not that I hope thou mayest do me more service, I would strike thee now at one blow to the ground.
Christian: I was born indeed in your Dominions, but your service was hard, and your wages such as a man could not live on, for the wages of Sin is death; therefore when I was come to years, I did as other considerate persons do, look out if perhaps I might mend my self.
Apollyon: There is no Prince that will thus lightly lose his Subjects, neither will I as yet lose thee. But since thou complainest of thy service and wages be content to go back; what our Country will afford, I do here promise to give thee.
Christian: But I have let myself to another, even to the King of Princes, and how can I with fairness go back with thee?
Apollyon: Thou hast done in this, according to the Proverb, Changed a bad for a worse: but it is ordinary for those that have professed themselves his Servants, after a while to give him the slip, and return again to me: do thou so to, and all shall be well.
Christian: I have given him my faith, and sworn my Allegiance to him; how then can I go back from this, and not be hanged as a Traitor?
Apollyon: Thou didst the same to me, and yet I am willing to pass by all, if now thou wilt yet turn again, and go back.
Christian: What I promised thee was in my nonage; and besides, I count that the Prince under whose Banner now I stand, is able to absolve me; yea, and to pardon also what I did as to my compliance with thee: and besides, (O thou destroying Apollyon) to speak truth, I like his Service, his Wages, his Servants, his Government, his Company, and Country better than thine: and, therefore, leave off to perswade me further, I am his Servant, and I will follow him.
Apollyon: Consider again when thou art in cool blood, what thou art like to meet with in the way that thou goest. Thou knowest that for the most part, his Servants come to an ill end, because they are transgressors against me, and my ways. How many of them have been put to shameful deaths! and besides, thou countest his service better than mine, whereas he never came yet from the place where he is, to deliver any that served him out of our hands; but as for me, how many times, as all the World very well knows, have I delivered, either by power or fraud, those that have faithfully served me, from him and his, though taken by them, and so I will deliver thee.
Christian: His forbearing at present to deliver them, is on purpose to try their love, whether they will cleave to him to the end: and as for the ill end thou sayest they come to, that is most glorious in their account. For for present deliverance, they do not much expect it; for they stay for their Glory, and then they shall have it, when their Prince comes in his, and the Glory of the Angels.
Apollyon: Thou hast already been unfaithful in thy service to him, and how doest thou think to receive wages of him?
Christian: Wherein, O Apollyon, have I been unfaithful to him?
Apollyon: Thou didst faint at first setting out, when thou wast almost choked in the Gulf of Dispond; thou didst attempt wrong ways to be rid of thy burden, whereas thou shouldest have stayed till thy Prince had taken it off: thou didst sinfully sleep and lose thy choice thing: thou wast also almost perswaded to go back, at the sight of the Lions; and when thou talkest of thy Journey, and of what thou hast heard, and seen, thou art inwardly desirous of vain-glory in all that thou sayest or doest.
Christian:All this is true, and much more, which thou hast left out; but the Prince whom I serve and honour, is merciful, and ready to forgive: but besides, these infirmities possessed me in thy Country, for there I suckt them in, and I have groaned under them, been sorry for them, and have obtained pardon of my Prince.
Apollyon: Then Apollyon broke out into a grievous rage, saying, I am an enemy to this Prince: I hate his Person, his Laws, and People: I am come out on purpose to withstand thee.
Christian: Apollyon beware what you do, for I am in the King's Highway, the way of Holiness, therefore take heed to your self.
Apollyon: Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter, prepare thy self to die, for I swear by my Infernal Den, that thou shalt go no further, here will I spill thy soul; and with that, he threw a flaming Dart at his breast, but Christian had a Shield in his hand, with which he caught it, and so prevented the danger of that. Then did Christian draw, for he saw 'twas time to bestir him; and Apollyon as fast made at him, throwing Darts as thick as Hail; by the which, notwithstanding all that Christian could do to avoid it, Apollyon wounded him in his head, his hand and foot; this made Christian give a little back: Apollyon therefore followed his work amain, and Christian again took courage, and resisted as manfully as he could. This sore combat lasted for above half a day, even till Christian was almost quite spent. For you must know that Christian by reason of his wounds, must needs grow weaker and weaker.
Then Apollyon espying his opportunity, began to gather up close to Christian, and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall; and with that, Christian's Sword flew out of his hand. Then said Apollyon, I am sure of thee now, and with that, he had almost prest him to death, so that Christian began to despair of life. But as God would have it, while Apollyon was fetching of his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this good Man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his Sword, and caught it, saying, Rejoice not against me, O mine Enemy! when I fall, I shall arise; and with that, gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back, as one that had received his mortal wound: Christian perceiving that, made at him again, saying, Nay, in all these things we are more than Conquerors, through him that loved us. And with that, Apollyon spread forth his Dragon's wings, and sped him away, that Christian saw him no more….”

John Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress

Source: The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Part I, Ch. IX : Apollyon

Love, Life, God, Hate

“The Hindus lost Kabul for good only in the closing decade of the 10th century. In AD 963 Alaptigin, a Turkish slave of the succeeding Samanid dynasty, had been able to establish an independent Muslim principality in Kabul with his seat at Ghazni. It was his general and successor, Subuktigin, who conquered Kabul after a struggle spread over two decades. The Hindus under king Jayapala of Udbhandapur made a bold bid to recapture Kabul in AD 986-987. A confederate Hindu army to which the Rajas of Delhi, Ajmer, Kalinjar and Kanauj has contributed troops and money, advanced into the heartland of the Islamic kingdom of Ghazni. “According to Utbi, the battle lasted several days and the warriors of Subuktigin, including prince Mahmood, were ‘reduced to despair.’ But a snow-storm and rains upset the plans of Jayapala who opened negotiations for peace. He sent the following message to Subuktigin: ‘You have heard and know the nobleness of Indians - they fear not death or destruction… In affairs of honour and renown we would place ourselves upon the fire like roast meat, and upon the dagger like the sunrays.’” But the peace thus concluded proved temporary. The Muslims resumed the offensive and the Hindus were defeated and driven out of Kabul. Dr. Mishra concludes with the comment that Jayapala “was perhaps the last Indian ruler to show such spirit of aggression, so sadly lacking in later Rajput kings.””

Jayapala (964–1001) Ruler of the Kabal Shabi

S.R. Goel, (1994) Heroic Hindu resistance to Muslim invaders, 636 AD to 1206 AD. ISBN 9788185990187 , quoting Ram Gopal Misra, Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Upto 1206 A.D. (1983).

Money, Fear, Peace, Despair

“But for those that are caught in any heinous sins, they cast them out of their society; and he who is thus separated from them does often die after a miserable manner; for as he is bound by the oath he hath taken, and by the customs he hath been engaged in, he is not at liberty to partake of that food that he meets with elsewhere, but is forced to eat grass, and to famish his body with hunger, till he perish; for which reason they receive many of them again when they are at their last gasp, out of compassion to them, as thinking the miseries they have endured till they came to the very brink of death to be a sufficient punishment for the sins they had been guilty of.”

Josephus on the Essenes

Jewish War

Hunger, Food, Thinking, Grass

“When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"The Obscurity of the Poet," Harvard University lecture (15 August 1950) delivered at the Harvard University Summer School Conference on the Defense of Poetry (August 14-17, 1950); reprinted in Partisan Review, XVIII (January/February 1951) and published in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources
Variant: When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

Life, Wisdom, Law, Imagination

“Q: At the time of death when the elements are changing rapidly and there is confusion and fear, what is the method to fix the mind in positivity?”

Baba Hari Dass (1923–2018) master yogi, author, builder, commentator of Indian spiritual tradition

Miscellaneous

Fear, Change, Time

“The Supreme Court of the United States… has validated the Nazi method of execution in… concentration camps, starving them to death!”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

Quoted in "Years of Minutes"‎ - Page 329 - by Andy Rooney - 2004
2000s, 2004

“[From Minna after stabbing Pauline von Lindorf to death]: Yes, I have killed her at last. They thought I did not know her, but I did. She took away my father's heart from me, and would have taken away my husband’s; but I have killed her at last.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Heart

“It was rumored, in 1946, that the hangman in Nuremberg adjusted the nooses of some of the condemned to magnify the pain of suffocation. Such sadism was not called for then and is not called for now. But if fornication is wrong, there is no denying that it can bring pleasure. The death of Saddam Hussein at rope's end brings a pleasure that is undeniable, and absolutely chaste in its provenance.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

"Spare Thoughts on Saddam" http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmRjMzcyYjBkZTA0ZGQ4NzI4M2ZkOGNjMTVlNDA4MTU= in National Review Online (2006-12-29).

Pain, Pleasure

“I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself "libertarian."… But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible… The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.”

Peter Thiel (1967) American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager

In an article http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian published by Cato Unbound (April 13, 2009)

Women, Faith, Democracy, History

“Thank God! some lights never go out. Death cannot quench them. They shine forever. Luther's great lantern, " The just shall live by faith," still gleams from Wartburg Castle. John Bunyan's lamp twinkles yet through the gratings of Bedford jail.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 351.

God, Faith, Light

“Routine is the death to heroism.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

The Man Upstairs (1914)

“There can be no doubt that the existence of public tortures and executions were connected with something quite other than this internal organization. Rusche and Kirchheimer are right to see it as the effect of a system of production in which labour power, and therefore the human body, has neither the utility nor the commercial value that are conferred on them in an economy of an industrial type. Moreover, this ‘contempt’ for the body is certainly related to a general attitude to death; and, in such an attitude, one can detect not only the values proper to Christianity, but a demographical, in a sense biological, situation: the ravages of disease and hunger, the periodic massacres of the epidemics, the formidable child mortality rate, the precariousness of the bio-economic balances – all this made death familiar and gave rise to rituals intended to integrate it, to make it acceptable and to give a meaning to its permanent aggression. But in analysing why the public executions survived for so long, one must also refer to the historical conjuncture; it must not be forgotten that the ordinance of 1670 that regulated criminal justice almost up to the Revolution had even increased in certain respects the rigour of the old edicts; Pussort, who, among the commissioners entrusted with the task of drawing up the documents, represented the intentions of the king, was responsible for this, despite the views of such magistrates as Lamoignon; the number of uprisings at the very height of the classical age, the rumbling close at hand of civil war, the king’s desire to assert his power at the expense of the parlements go a long way to explain the survival of so severe a penal system.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 51

Hunger, War, Age, Disease

“It was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism.”

Ian Buruma (1951) Dutch writer and academic

Battling the Information Barbarians China often views the ideas of foreigners, from missionaries in the 17th century to 21st-century Internet entrepreneurs, as subversive imports. The tumultuous history behind the clash with Google. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031263063242900.html#video%3DA8F64C9A-F513-4C06-8E68-CCB96C2ED70D%26articleTabs%3Darticle

“One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!

Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly
Young, and so fair!”

Thomas Hood The Bridge of Sighs

The Bridge of Sighs (1844), st. 1-2.
1840s

“My first thought was that a man who had come through a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than I received.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea-Wolf (1904), Chapter Two

“Scorned and ridiculed by many critics during his presidency, Lincoln became a martyr and almost a saint after his death. His words and deeds lived after him, and will be revered as long as there is a United States. Indeed, it seems quite likely that without his determined leadership the United States would have ceased to be.”

James M. McPherson (1936) American historian

James M. McPherson. Abraham Lincoln, (2009) p. 65
2000s

“Exploiting the fears among Munich’s new rulers about a repeat of the Munich Soviet Republic, [Hitler] volunteered to become an informant for the new masters of the city. By becoming a turncoat, he managed against all odds, not only to escape decommissioning and thus to escape an uncertain future, but also to emerge strengthened from a situation that otherwise might have resulted in deportation to his native Austria, imprisonment, or even death.”

Thomas Weber (historian) (1974) German historian

Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), p. 72

Fear, Future

“The work itself, whether thought of as image of idea, as revelation, or as a manifest of meaning, could not have existed without a profound concern to achieve a purpose beyond vanity, ambition or remembrance, for a man’s term of life. Yet, while one looks at his works, a warning should be given, lest one forget, among the multitude of issues, the relation I bear to those with 'eyes'. Although the reference is in a different context and for another purpose, a metaphor is pertinent as William Blake set it down: THE Vision of Christ that thou dost see – Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy: - Thine is the friend of All Mankind, - Mine speaks in parables to the Blind: 'Therefore, let no man under-value the implications of this work or its power for life; - or for death, if it is misused'.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Letter to Gordon Smith, January 1, 1959, as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 196
1950s

Life, Idea, Christ, Forgetting

“Some philosophers—and those to whom we are indebted for the most stupendous discoveries in physical science, suppose… that intelligence is the mere result of certain combinations among the particles of its objects; and those among them who believe that we live after death, recur to the interposition of a supernatural power, which shall overcome the tendency inherent in all material combinations, to dissipate and be absorbed into other forms.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Intelligence, Science

“Flowers fade and fly, and flying fill the sky;
Their bloom departs, their perfume gone, yet who stands pitying by? …
Oh, let me sadly bury them beside these steps to-night! …
Farewell, dear flowers, for ever now, thus buried as 'twas best,
I have not yet divined when I with you shall sink to rest.
I who can bury flowers like this a laughing-stock shall be;
I cannot say in days to come what hands shall bury me.
See how when spring begins to fail each opening floweret fades;
So too there is a time of age and death for beauteous maids;
And when the fleeting spring is gone, and days of beauty o'er,
Flowers fall, and lovely maidens die, and both are known no more.”

Herbert Giles book A History of Chinese Literature

"The Hung Lou Mêng", p. 368
A History of Chinese Literature (1901)

Love, Age, Beauty, Spring

“Dinosaurs first existed around 6,000 years ago. Because dinosaurs were land animals, and God made all the land animals on day six of the creation week, dinosaurs were created on day six. Dinosaurs could not have died out before this time because death, bloodshed, disease and suffering is a result of Adam's sin. Adam and Eve were also made on day six alongside the dinosaurs - so dinosaurs lived with people. Representatives of all the KINDS of land animals, including the dinosaur kinds went on board Noah's ark. All those that were left behind drowned in the cataclysmic circumstances of the Flood - many of their remains became fossils. After the Flood (around 4,500 years ago), the land animals (including dinosaurs) came off the ark and lived in the present world, beside people. Because of sin, the judgement of the curse and the effects of the Flood have greatly changed the earth. Since the Flood, many animals have died out from diseases, a lack of food, etc. The dinosaurs, like many other creatures, seem to have also died out. According to this view, there is no mystery about dinosaurs!”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved! (2000)

God, People, World, Disease

“In their speech is death, hell in their smile.”

Edward Fairfax (1580–1635) English translator

Book XIX, stanza 84
Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1600)

Smile, Hell

“The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"To Civilize our Gentlemen" (1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

Imagination, Cry

“Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death…”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Light of Other Days

Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 28

Life, Universe

“Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death — this infantile fixation of mine — was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry — with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels (1971).

Fear, Feeling, Painting, Night

“When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" Peace http://www.bartleby.com/122/22.html", lines 3-6 <br class="br">Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

War, Peace, Heart

“We have a moral obligation to be interesting, for our gospel is loaded with life-and-death interest for people.”

Halford E. Luccock (1885–1960) American Methodist minister

As quoted in "Religion : Go Ye and Relax?" in TIME magazine (20 April 1953)

Life, People

“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 9

Art

“There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

The Marquis de Sade, cited by Bataille in Erotism: Death and Sensuality
Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1962)

Way

“The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ … of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950)

Sense

“Man as such is nature sick unto death, derailed, run off the rails through a fascination with a lethal Thing.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

204
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Nature

“I don't think victory over death… is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was.”

Vera Brittain book Testament of Youth

Source: Testament of Youth (1933), Chapter 12 [quoting a 1924 letter]

Love, Life, Fear, Thinking

“He (Sri Aurobindo) did not keep me, what could I do? I had to go. But I left my psychic being with him, and in France I was once on the point of death: the doctors had given me Up.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

When she left Pondicherry on 22 February 1915, when her husband was called home [France] to join the French Reserve Army, quoted in "Diary notes and Meeting with Sri Aurobindo", Sri Aurobindo Circle, Issue 33 by Aurobindo Ghose (1977) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=bcPWAAAAMAAJ, p. 84

“When women and men have approximately equal life expectancies, it seems to be because women die not only in childbirth (fewer than thought) but about equal from… diseases; poor sanitation and water; inadequate healthcare; and diseases of malnutrition. In industrialized societies, early deaths are caused more by diseases triggered by stress, which breaks down the immune system. It is since stress has become the key factor that men have died so much sooner than women.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 182.

Life, Women, Men, Disease

“Without regard to his conscience, the economic system involves a man in the guilt of the moral and physical death of his brothers: their blood cries to him from the adulterated and monopolized foods he eats; from the sweat-shop clothes he wears; from his educational advantages, his special privileges, his social opportunities. … In fine, civilization denies to man that highest of all rights — the right to live a guiltless life, the right to do right.”

George D. Herron (1862–1925) American clergyman, writer and activist

Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), p. 20

Life, Education, Food, Clothes

“To show you how cosmically irrelevant the Warren Report is for the most part … one of the exhibits is classified in the front as, 'A Study of the Teeth of Jack Ruby's Mother.' Even if Jack Ruby had intended to bite Oswald to death, that still would not have been relevant.”

Jim Garrison (1921–1992) American judge

[Gil Jesus, The Garrison Investigation, video interview.]

Study, Parting

“From shortly after his death until the present Gascoigne's reputation as the foremost poet of his generation and as a precursor of the great Elizabethans has remained constant.”

George Gascoigne (1525–1577) English politician and poet

G. W. Pigman III, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) vol. 21, p. 585.
Criticism

“Alas, because I'm no longer innocent. We're civilized beings. Whether we like it or not, we have the cares and concerns of classical civilization in our bones. I want to express myself clearly when I paint. In people who feign ignorance there is a kind of barbarism even more detestable than the academic kind: it's no longer possible to be ignorant today. One no longer is. We come into the world armed with facility. Facility is the death of art and we must rid ourselves of it.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 155, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif': Cited in: George Pattison. God and Being: An Enquiry, (2011). p. 64

People, World, Art, Painting

“In my strategy, the training for killing enemies is by way of many contests, fighting for survival, discovering the meaning of life and death, learning the Way of the sword, judging the strength of attacks and understanding the Way of the "edge and ridge" of the sword.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Fire Book

Life, Way, Understanding, Learning

“Fact: death too is in the egg.
Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
And tomorrow the O. R. Only the summer was sweet.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"The Operation"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

Summer

“You resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Treason (1988)

Life

“Ah! Postumus! Devotion fails
The lapse of gliding years to stay,
With wrinkled age it nought avails
Nor conjures conquering Death away.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Book II, ode xiv
Translations, The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace (1863)

Age

“The Hindu was taxed to the extent of half the produce of his land, and had to pay duties on all his buffaloes, goats, and other milk-cattle. The taxes were to be levied equally on rich and poor, at so much per acre, so much per animal. Any collectors or officers taking bribes were summarily dismissed and heavily punished with sticks, pincers, the rack, imprisonment and chains. The new rules were strictly carried out, so that one revenue officer would string together 20 Hindu notables and enforce payment by blows. No gold or silver, not even the betelnut, so cheering and stimulative to pleasure, was to be seen in a Hindu house, and the wives of the impoverished native officials were reduced to taking service in Muslim families. Revenue officers came to be regarded as more deadly than the plague; and to be a government clerk was disgrace worse than death, in so much that no Hindu would marry his daughter to such a man. … [These edicts] were so strictly carried out that the chaukidars and khuts and muqad-dims were not able to ride on horseback, to find weapon, to wear fine clothes, or to indulge in betel.. …. No Hindu could hold up his head. ….. Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains were all employed to enforce payment.”

Stanley Lane-Poole (1854–1931) British orientalist

Lane Poole : Medieval India, quoted from B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Pleasure, Family, Animals, Housing

“Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it…”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 119

Happiness, Suicide, Loyalty

“After visiting these places, you can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

After visiting such Nazi strongholds as were found in Berchtesgaden and Kehlsteinhaus; Personal diary (1 August 1945); published in Prelude to Leadership (1995)
Pre-1960

World, Peace, Way, Understanding

“The world doth ever change; there is no peace
Among the shallows of its storm-vexed breast;
With every breath the frothy waves increase,
They toss up mire and dirt, they cannot rest;
I thank Thee that within thy strong-built ark
My soul across the uncertain sea can sail,
And though the night of death be long and dark,
My hopes in Christ shall reach within the veil;
And to the promised haven steady steer,
Whose rest to those who love is ever near.”

Jones Very (1813–1880) American poet and essayist

From The Ark

Love, World, Peace, Hope

“They left no stone unturned in de-Hinduizing or denationalizing the Hindus, in effect de-Indianizing the Indians, in various ways. It is preposterous to question their credentials as true Muslims. Their 'Ulama' exhorted them off and on to make the best of their sword to root out the Hindus and convert India into a full-fledged Dar al-lslam. Sayyid Nur ad-Din Mubarak Ghaznawi Suhrawardi, at once a leading Sufi, a leading Muslim divine, and the Shaykh al-lslam of Sultan Iltutmish. led a deputation of Ulama to the Sultan and advised him to give an ultimatum to the Hindus to embrace Islam or face death. The Sultan’s prime minister pleaded powerlessness on his behalf to do so." Then the Shaykh offered an alternative suggestion: ’… the king should at least strive to disgrace, dishonour, and defame the Mushrik and idol- worshipping Hindus…. The sign of the kings being protectors of the faith is this: When they see a Hindu, their faces turn red and they wish to swallow him alive….' A similar suggestion was made to Jalal ad-Din Khalji, who returned ruefully: 'Don’t you see that Hindus, who are the worst enemies of God and of Islam, pass daily below my royal palace to the Jamuna beating drums and playing flutes, and practise before our eyes the worship of the idols with all the rituals? Fie on us unworthy leaders who declare ourselves Muslim kings!… Had I been a Muslim ruler, a real king, or a prince and felt myself strong and powerful enough to protect Islam, any enemy of God and the faith of the Prophet of Islam would not have been allowed to chew betels in a care-free manner and put on a clean garment or live in peace. Qadi Mughis ad- Din’s advice to Sultan Ala' d-Din Khaiji was on similer lines, and the Sultan confessed that he had humiliated and pauperized the Hindus to his utmost even though without caring to know the provisions of the Shari'ah on the subject.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990)

God, Peace, Faith, Way

“In heaven.. we will not longer cry, feel sad, or face death. …Our bodies will be perfect, locked into eternal youth…ageless.”

Paul P. Enns (1937) American theologian

Source: Heaven Revealed (Moody, 2011), p. 125

Youth, Sadness, Feeling, Perfection

“It is the small flock of God. "Whoever receives in my name one of those little" said Jesus, "It is myself who receives." What thinks the one that sticks, that maims, or inflicts to their pure souls more black sorrow than death? (…) The curse of a crowd of children, is a cataclysm, a horror prodigy, a chain of dark mountains in the sky, with a cavalcade of thunder and lightning in their tops. It is the infinite of the cries of all deep, is a not know what highly powerful unforgiving and extinguishing any hope of forgiveness.”

Léon Bloy (1846–1917) French writer, poet and essayist

Léon Bloy, Octavio de Faria, portuguese edition, page 101. Léon Bloy, Octavio de Faria, portuguese edition, page 101. https://books.google.com.br/books?id=wI4SAAAAYAAJ&q=%C3%89+o+rebanho+dos+pequenos+de+Deus.+%22Quem+quer+que+receba+em+meu+nome+um+desses+pequenos%22+disse+Jesus&dq=%C3%89+o+rebanho+dos+pequenos+de+Deus.+%22Quem+quer+que+receba+em+meu+nome+um+desses+pequenos%22+disse+Jesus&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAGoVChMI0Ovrgrn5yAIVQpGQCh3fFwGB

God, Children, Hope, Soul

“Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.”

Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English polymath

On Dreams

Parting

“From the beginning of the year to the end, day and night, morning and evening, in action and repose, in speech and in silence, the warrior must keep death constantly before him and have ever in mind that the one death [which he has to give] should not be suffered in vain. In other words [he must have perfect control over his own death] just as if he were holding an intemperate steed in rein. Only he who truly keeps death in mind this way can understand what is meant by [Yamaga Soko's maxim of] "preparedness."”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. IV.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

Way, Understanding, Silence, Suffering

“To be so closely caught up in the teeth of things that they kill you, no matter how infinitesimally kill you, is, truly, to be a poet: and to be a poet in fact it is additionally necessary that you should possess the tongues and instruments with which to record this series of infinitesimal deaths.”

George Barker (1913–1991) British poet

"Therefore All Poems Are Elegies" in New Poems : 1940 : An Anthology of British and American Verse (1941) edited by Oscar Williams, p. 15

“In the course of history the refugee was the first peaceful immigrant. In a social structure offering no place for a stranger, the unfortunate who had" taken the flight and so evaded death and black fate" at the hands of his enemies was sheltered under the sacred law of hospitality, since he came "as a fugative and a suppliant."”

Eugene M. Kulischer (1881–1956) American sociologist

Kulischer (1949) "Displaced Persons in the Modern World" in: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 262, Reappraising Our Immigration Policy (Mar., 1949), p. 166

Fate, Peace, Law, History

“I don't think there are any irredeemable themes or tropes, just ones that are waiting for a fresh eye. Horror, science fiction, and fantasy deal with the eternal verities, the subjects that have always - and will always - speak most deeply about who we are. That's why they're the most fascinating genres, and why they're always there to be reinvented. At the very least you can ask, "This subject has been done to death now, so why are we so obsessed with it?"”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

and take a new angle from there.
Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Thinking, Science, Waiting

“Death is sweeter than continued life under tyranny. … Retaliation is a prescription from God. … We must rise up and kill those who kill us... Let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling.”

Louis Farrakhan (1933) leader of the Nation of Islam

August 15, 2015 http://www.wnd.com/wnd_video/farrakhan-retaliation-we-must-rise-up-and-kill-those-who-kill-us/ (15 August 2015)

Life, God, Pain, Feeling

“Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth
On war's red techstone rang true metal;
Who ventered life an' love an' youth
For the gret prize o' death in battle?”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

No. 10.
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

Love, Life, War, Truth

“Death had won my three friends; Death had almost won me. But now I was the one who was going to win and I was going to win by outwitting Death over and over again … To compete with Death, as I had discovered in the mountains, was to know one was alive.”

Susan Howatch book The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune (1984), Part 1: Robert

Mountain

“But when I do think about religious problems, I think in Hindu categories. When my father died, it was the first time something really terrible happened to me-and Christianity and Judaism were of absolutely no use to me. My Jewish and Christian friends would take me to synagogues and churches, and it didn't help at all. And then I started thinking about the myths I was translating at the time, which were about death-why there is death, how death came into the world, what happens when we die, speculations about karma and rebirth. The Hindu version of it made more sense to me than anything. It just seemed like Shiva as a god was more likely to be responsible for the world the way I knew it than the gods of Judaism and Christianity. Capricious, beautiful, violent, it just made more sense.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

About her intent to practice Hinduism.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

God, World, Beauty, Way

“One family — we dwell in Him,
One church above, beneath,
Though now divided by the stream,
The narrow stream of death.”

Charles Wesley (1707–1788) English Methodist and hymn writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 150.

Family

“Since the Nazi era need never have happened, to say that he prophesised it is actually a belittlement of his creative achievement, and only one step up from saying that he caused the whole thing. But nobody could now read The Trial without thinking of the Soviet show trials, or the short works Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony without thinking of the death camps.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Franz Kafka', p. 344
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Thinking, Reading

“Some of the captured women killed themselves. I didn’t. others yielded and learned to love their captors. I wouldn’t do either one. I knew I would escape. Death is forever; to learn to love the hand that crushes you is a shame not to be borne. Pain and slavery will pass. I believed this and it kept me alive”

Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer

Devoted

Love, Women, Pain, Learning

“Many, if not most, Americans can imagine a fate worse than death, and it is a seemingly interminable process of dying. For them, it is frightening that politicians can find ways to interject themselves into this sad process.”

John Danforth (1936) American politician

Page 72
Faith and Politics (2006)

Fate, Sadness, Way, Imagination

“The first deaths will barely swell the daily count, and no one in the statistics bureau will notice that extra zero. But after a while everyone will begin to look at each other and ask: what's happening? Because for months doors and windows are going to rattle, furniture and trees will creak.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

The Clerk's Vision (1949)

Tree

“Defoe says, that there were a hundred thousand stout country-fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Prejudice"
Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

Time, Horse, Fight, Country

“To die for one’s country is such a worthy fate
That all compete for so beautiful a death.”

Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) French tragedian

Mourir pour le pays est un si digne sort,
Qu’on briguerait en foule une si belle mort.
Horace, act II, scene iii.
Horace (1639)

Fate, Beauty, Country

“The world recedes; it disappears!
Heav'n opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring!
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O grave! where is thy victory?
O death! where is thy sting?”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

the last two lines are a quote of 1 Corinthians 15:55 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/1_Corinthians#15:55. <br class="br">The Dying Christian to His Soul (1712)

World, Victory, Flying

“It may remain for us to learn … that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) writer

Source: Out of the East, pp. 156–7.

Hunger, World, Error, Birth

“I don't know what God is.
I don't know what death is. But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

"Sometimes", § 1
Red Bird (2008)

God

“War is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

Preface (page XIX)
The Great War for Civilization (2005)

War, Failure, Victory

“You just can't bowl spin to MS Dhoni in the death overs. He is simply the best in the World.”

MS Dhoni (1981) Indian cricket player

Alastair Cook https://www.scoopwhoop.com/sports/dhoni-quotes/

World

“Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 209

Stupidity, Personality

“It is just beyond Maryland, which is another obstacle. I heard the other day that God originally made oysters with legs, and afterward took them off, knowing that the people of Delaware would starve to death before they would run to catch anything.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Interview with the Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1881.

God, People

“Looking out from death you will always see
Those whom all your life you ought not to see”

Duo Duo (1951) Poet

"Looking Out from Death" (1983), p. 51
The Boy who Catches Wasps (2002)

Life

“Good deeds remain good, no matter whether we know how the world was made or not. Vile deeds are vile, no matter whether we know or do not know what, after death, will be the fate of the doer. We know, at least, what his fate is now, namely, to be wedded to the vileness.
The question for anyone to decide, who hesitates between good and evil, is whether he aspires to be a full-weight man, or merely the fragment, nay, the counterfeit of a man. Only he who ceaselessly aims at moral completeness is, in the true sense, a human being.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 9 : Ethical Outlook
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

Fate, World, Question, Sense

“We have no other alternative than independence, or the most ignominious and galling servitude. The legions of our enemies thicken on our plains; desolation and death mark their bloody career; whilst the mangled corpses of our countrymen seem to cry out to us as a voice from Heaven.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Speech about Declaration of Independence (1776)

Cry

“No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"How to Organise Competition?" (27 December 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/dec/25.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 411, 414. <br class="br">1910s

War, People