Quotes about death

page 5

“Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference.
So unless were going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes.”

“Death is part of who we are. It guides
us. It shapes us. It drives us to madness. Can you still be human if you have no mortal end”

“Welcome the view that the things which you think are wrecking your life - like your thoughts and emotions, or illness and death - are actually gifts for your transformation… Whether life presents us with a pleasant sound or an unpleasant sound, a pleasant smell or an unpleasant smell, a pleasant thought or an unpleasant thought, it's sheer delight because instead of identifying with the experience, we simply touch it and let it go.”

“I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.”

“For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.”

“Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.”

“I believe in reincarnation,” [Bjorn] said.
I KNOW.
“I tried to live a good life. Does that help?”
THAT’S NOT UP TO ME. Death coughed. OF COURSE… SINCE YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION… YOU’LL BE BJORN AGAIN.”

“Death frees from the fear of dying”

“A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.”

“It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.”

“When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

“There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.”

“THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. FASCINATING.”

“She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do.
And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find
herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella.”

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

“All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don't tiptoe.”

“All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there.”

“My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.”

“Old age is the lubricant of belief. When death knocks at the door, skepticism flies out the window. A serious cardiovascular fright and a person will even believe in Little Red Riding Hood.”

“Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.”

“death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns”

“I'd love to tell you I had some deep revelation on my way down, that I came to terms with my own mortality, laughed in the face of death, et cetera.

The truth? My only thought was: Aaaaggghhhhh!”

“They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence, and out of that moment, heaven or hell is born.”

“If words had weight, a single sentence from Death would have anchored a ship.”

“I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.”

“Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.”

“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”

“When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.”

“This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.”

“Death is a fiction created by people who live their lives in total unawareness. There is only life, life and life alone, moving from one dimension to another, another dimension to another.”

“Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed…
This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.”

“Our life is made by the death of others.”

“And what would humans be without love?"
RARE, said Death.”

“I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! —and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.”

“I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.”

“Life… is a paradise to what we fear of death.”

“And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.”

“Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down.”

“I ain't saying you're a liar, because that wouldn't be polite. But I'll tell you this, ma'am. If I loved liars, I'd hug you to death.”

“And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry
the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.”

“And make death proud to take us.”

“Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.”

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

“I am so far from being a pessimist… on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.”

“Get up, go and be like him as much as one alive can be like the dead—without dying. Conceive him, yet be your death, too, almost. Like him be now, but only till the shadow of his end falls on the shadow of your being.”

“There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.”

“As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.”

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

“I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death…. is the true measure of the Divine within us.”

“NAUGHTY AND NICE? said Death. BUT IT'S EASY TO BE NICE IF YOU'RE RICH. IS THIS FAIR?
Albert wanted to argue. He wanted to say, Really? In that case, how come so many of the rich buggers is bastards? And being poor don't mean being naughty, neither.”

“The bond between friends cannot be broken by chance; no interval of time or space can destroy it. Not even death itself can part true friends.”

“He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace and fear:
And you all know, security
Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”

“Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.”

“All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”

“Tʜᴇʀᴇ's ɴᴏ ᴊᴜsᴛɪᴄᴇ, ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ's ᴊᴜsᴛ ᴍᴇ.

—Death”

“I hate cats."
Death's face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant.
"I SEE," he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat haters.”

“I have lost friends, some by death… others by sheer inability to cross the street.”

“Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.”

“In the midst of life, we are in death.”

“Is death the last sleep? No, it is the last and final awakening.”

“But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.”

“Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream—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”

“Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain.”

“Death is more universal than life. Everyone dies, but not everyone lives.”

“Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.”

“Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.”

“Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.”

“And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.”

“I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, said Death, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE.”

“The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong done them by man, beast or fate. The only thing that keeps them in line is their fear of death, jail and lawsuits.”

“Death strode away, stopped, and came back. He pointed a skeletal finger at The Duck Man.
WHY, he said, ARE YOU WALKING AROUND WITH THAT DUCK?
"What duck?"
AH. SORRY.”

“If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.”

“Clown: Good Madonna, why mournest thou?
Olivia: Good Fool, for my brother's death.
Clown:I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.
Olivia:I know his soul is in heaven, Fool.
Clown: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven.”

“After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”

“Death is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.”

“Strange secrets are let out by Death
Who blabs so oft the follies of this world.”

“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”

“Do not forget, man, consumed by lust:
you—are the stone, the desert, are death …”

“Old age diminishes our strength; it takes away our pleasures one after the other; it withers the soul as well as the body; it renders adventure and friendship difficult; and finally it is shadowed by thoughts of death.”

“Loss and Possession, Death and Life are one.
There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.”

“You must get away from the real thing because the real thing will limit your acting and cripple you. To think of your own mother's death each time you want to cry onstage is schizophrenic and sick.”

“If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains "peace of mind."”

“We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?
This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”

“[In what way would you have us bury you? ] In any way that you like; only you must get hold of me, and take care that I do not walk away from you. …I cannot make Crito believe that I am the same Socrates who have been talking and conducting the argument; he fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead body… And though I have spoken many words in the endeavor to show that when I have drunk the poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed—these words of mine, with which I comforted you and myself, have had, I perceive, no effect upon Crito. …you should be my surety to him that I shall not remain, but go away and depart; and then he will suffer less at my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body being burned or buried.”

“I'm not scared of dying. I'm not scared of death. I'll keep a smile 'til my last breath. I've loved 'til I've lost. I've lived how I felt. One day I will find peace within myself.”

“But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay”

“When in 1716 Banda Bahadur with his 740 followers was given by Farrukh Siyar the choice between Islam and death, they all died to a man rather than become Musalman.”

“And feels a thousand deaths in fearing one.”

“I am quite ready, Simmias and Cebes, that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded that I am going to other gods who are wise and good and to men departed who are better than those whom I leave behind; and therefore I do not grieve as I might have done, for I have good hope that there is yet something remaining for the dead, and, as has been said of old, some far better thing for the good than for the evil.”

“Fear is death, fear is sin, fear is hell, fear is unrighteousness, fear is wrong life. All the negative thoughts and ideas that are in the world have proceeded from this evil spirit of fear.”

“Someone said to me 'To you football is a matter of life or death!' and I said 'Listen, it's more important than that'.”

“Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.”

“Some part of life – perhaps the most important part – must be left to the spontaneous action of individual impulse, for where all is system there will be mental and spiritual death.”

“The man who dares to live his life with death before his eyes, the man who receives life back bit by bit and lives as though it did not belong to him by right but has been bestowed on him as a gift, the man who has such freedom and peace of mind that he has overcome death in his thoughts — such man believes in eternal life because it is already his, it is a present experience, and he already benefits from its peace and joy. He cannot describe this experience in words. He may not be able to conform his view with the traditional picture of it. But one thing he knows for certain: Something within us does not pass away, something goes on living and working wherever the kingdom of the spirit is present. It is already working and living within us, because in our hearts we have been able to reach life by overcoming death.”

“During my most recently controlled near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, “fit to split the ears of groundlings.””

“My first near-death experience was an accident, a botched anesthesia during a triple bypass. I had listened to several people on TV talk shows who had gone down the blue tunnel to the Pearly Gates, and even beyond the Pearly Gates, or so they said, and then come back to life again. But I certainly wouldn't have set out on such a risky expedition on purpose, without first having survived one …
To go through the Pearly Gates, no matter how tempting the interviewee on the other side, as I myself discovered the hard way, is to run the risk that crotchety Saint Peter, depending on his mood, may never let you out again. Think of how heartbroken your friends and relatives would be if, by going through the Pearly Gates to talk to Napoleon, say, you in effect committed suicide.”

“What proofs other than negative have we that the animal is without a surviving, if not immortal, soul? On strictly scientific grounds we can adduce as many arguments pro as contra. To express it clearer, neither man nor animal can offer either proof or disproof of the survival of their souls after death. And from the point of view of scientific experience, it is impossible to bring that which has no objective existence under the cognizance of any exact law of science.”

“To me death is better than the defensive.”

“The flames roll'd on­-he would not go
Without his father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.”