Quotes about die
page 37

Seneca the Younger photo
Seneca the Younger photo
Seneca the Younger photo

“I should prefer that Fortune keep me in her camp rather than in the lap of luxury. If I am tortured, but bear it bravely, all is well; if I die, but die bravely, it is also well.”

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXVII: On Ill-Health and Endurance of Suffering

Seneca the Younger photo

“You must die erect and unyielding.”

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXVII: On Allegiance to Virtue

Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Poul Anderson photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“Had Abraham Lincoln died from any of the numerous ills to which flesh is heir; had he reached that good old age of which his vigorous constitution and his temperate habits gave promise; had he been permitted to see the end of his great work; had the solemn curtain of death come down but gradually, we should still have been smitten with a heavy grief, and treasured his name lovingly. But dying as he did die, by the red hand of violence, killed, assassinated, taken off without warning, not because of personal hate, for no man who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him, but because of his fidelity to union and liberty, he is doubly dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Fellow citizens, I end, as I began, with congratulations. We have done a good work for our race today. In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator, we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us. We have been fastening ourselves to a name and fame imperishable and immortal; we have also been defending ourselves from a blighting scandal. When now it shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors; when the foul reproach of ingratitude is hurled at us, and it is attempted to scourge us beyond the range of human brotherhood, we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.
1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Stephen King photo
Keir Starmer photo

“When you say you will leave without a deal - do or die - what sort of message does that send to the people of Northern Ireland?”

Keir Starmer (1962) British politician and barrister

Sir Keir Starmer: MPs 'casual' about no-deal Brexit for NI https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49797636 BBC News (23 September 2019)
2019

Gore Vidal photo
Leopold Kronecker photo
Bret Stephens photo
Wilfred Thesiger photo
Charles Symmons photo

“And shall I die? and unrevenged?”

Charles Symmons (1749–1826) Welsh poet

she said:
"Yes! let me die! thus—thus I plunge in night."
Book IV, lines 887–888
The Æneis (1817)

Norodom Ranariddh photo

“I have encouraged him. I said to him after he told me that Hun Sen told him he wished him to be the next King…When I die, please replace me. Never continue to be Prime Minister, even the only Prime Minister. It will be good for you to be King because as King it will be easier to have a clean reputation.”

Norodom Ranariddh (1944) Cambodian politician

by Norodom Sihanouk in 1996
[Jason Barber, http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/royal-trumps-table-aces-sleeve, Royal trumps on the table, aces up the sleeve, 22 March 1996, 29 August 2015, Phnom Penh Post]

Anu Garg photo

“Anu Garg triggers the kind of passionate reaction that actors, authors and memoirists would die for.”

Anu Garg (1967) Indian author

Kevin
Johnson
USA Today
2003-01-01
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-01-02-email-book_x.htm
He spread the words, one e-mail at a time

Bobby Robson photo

“Bobby Robson is one of those people who never die, not so much for what he did in his career, for one victory more or less, but for what he knew to give to those who had, like me, the good fortune to know him and walk by his side.”

Bobby Robson (1933–2009) English association football player and manager

Jose Mourinho, 2009. http://www.theguardian.com/football/2009/jul/31/sir-bobby-robson-tributes

Victor Villaseñor photo
Premchand photo

“If a woman does not get love in her life, it is better for her to die.”

Premchand (1880–1936) Hindi writer

In page =90
Portrayal of Women in Premchands Stories A Critique

Shaun Micallef photo
Robert Mayer photo
Louis C.K. photo
August von Kotzebue photo

“Die liebenswürdigste der Frauen wird immer auch die schönste sein.”

August von Kotzebue (1761–1819) German dramatist

Die neue Frauenschule.
Untranslated

Robert Spencer photo
Khaled Hosseini photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo

“But if we look a little deeper we shall find there is a pathetic, one might almost say a tragic, side to the picture. A shy man means a lonely man—a man cut off from all companionship, all sociability. He moves about the world, but does not mix with it. Between him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impassable barrier—a strong, invisible wall that, trying in vain to scale, he but bruises himself against. He sees the pleasant faces and hears the pleasant voices on the other side, but he cannot stretch his hand across to grasp another hand. He stands watching the merry groups, and he longs to speak and to claim kindred with them. But they pass him by, chatting gayly to one another, and he cannot stay them. He tries to reach them, but his prison walls move with him and hem him in on every side. In the busy street, in the crowded room, in the grind of work, in the whirl of pleasure, amid the many or amid the few—wherever men congregate together, wherever the music of human speech is heard and human thought is flashed from human eyes, there, shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, stands apart. His soul is full of love and longing, but the world knows it not. The iron mask of shyness is riveted before his face, and the man beneath is never seen. Genial words and hearty greetings are ever rising to his lips, but they die away in unheard whispers behind the steel clamps. His heart aches for the weary brother, but his sympathy is dumb. Contempt and indignation against wrong choke up his throat, and finding no safety-valve whence in passionate utterance they may burst forth, they only turn in again and harm him. All the hate and scorn and love of a deep nature such as the shy man is ever cursed by fester and corrupt within, instead of spending themselves abroad, and sour him into a misanthrope and cynic.”

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Sam Kinison photo

“My destiny is accomplished and I die content.”

How often she made such quotations as these, said or felt or was them! For just as many Americans want art to be Life, so this American novelist wanted life to be Art, not seeing that many of the values—though not, perhaps, the final ones—of life and art are irreconcilable; so that her life looked coldly into the mirror that it held up to itself, and saw that it was full of quotations, of data and analysis and epigrams, of naked and shameful truths, of facts: it saw that it was a novel by Gertrude Johnson.
Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 5: “Gertrude and Sidney”, p. 214

Colin Wilson photo

“Now he saw the problem with great clarity. If he lived here, life would be pleasant and safe. But it would also be predictable. A child could be born here, grow up here, die here, without ever experiencing the excitement of discovery. Why did Dona question him endlessly about his life in the burrow and his journey to the country of the ants? Because for her, it represented a world that was dangerous and full of fascinating possibilities. For the children of this underground city, life was a matter of repetition, of habit.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

And this, he suddenly realized, was the heart of the problem. Habit. Habit was a stifling, warm blanket that threatened you with suffocation and lulled the mind into a state of perpetual nagging dissatisfaction. Habit meant the inability to escape from yourself, to change and develop . . .

pp. 132-133
Spider World: The Desert (1987)

W. Mark Felt photo

“William Mark Felt was a traitor to Nixon and America! What he did caused 53,000 American soldiers to die for nothing in Vietnam!”

W. Mark Felt (1913–2008) Whistleblower who exposed the Watergate scandal

Pat Buchanan on MSNBC (31 May 2005)

Mahathir bin Mohamad photo
John Muir photo
Nelson Mandela photo
Julian of Norwich photo

“Now behoveth me to tell in what manner I saw sin deadly in the creatures which shall not die for sin, but live in the joy of God without end.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 72

E.M. Forster photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Janis Joplin photo

“Oh! But it don't make no difference, babe, hey,
And I know that I could always try.
Theres a fire inside everyone of us,
You'd better need it now,
I got to hold it, yeah,
I better use it till the day I die.”

Janis Joplin (1943–1970) American singer and songwriter

"Kozmic Blues", co-written with Gabriel Mekler
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969)

Samuel Adams photo

“The eyes of the people are upon us. […] If we despond, public confidence is destroyed, the people will no longer yield their support to a hopeless contest, and American liberty is no more. […] Despondency becomes not the dignity of our cause, nor the character of those who are its supporters. Let us awaken then, and evince a different spirit, - a spirit that shall inspire the people with confidence in themselves and in us, - a spirit that will encourage them to persevere in this glorious struggle, until their rights and liberties shall be established on a rock. We have proclaimed to the world our determination 'to die freemen, rather than to live slaves.”

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

We have appealed to Heaven for the justice of our cause, and in Heaven we have placed our trust. [...] We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection.
addressing a meeting of delegates to the Continental Congress, assembled at Yorktown, Pennsylvania, September 1777 ; as quoted in The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, Volume 2, by William Vincent Wells; Little, Brown, and Company; Boston, 1865 ; pp. 492-493

Salvador Dalí photo

“Just now I'm painting a beautiful woman, smiling, burnt to a crisp, with feathers of all colors, held up by a small die of burning marble; the die is in turn held up by a little puff of smoke, churned and quite; in the sky there are asses with parrot-heads, grasses and beach sand, all about to explode, all clean, incredible objective..”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote in Dali's letter to his art-friend Lorca, 1927; as quoted in Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, Robin Adèle Greeley, p. 67
Dali is striving then for a rational approach of his paintings; he is very probably referring to his painting, he made earlier in 1927: ' Little Ashes' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Little_Ashes.jpg
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Bernard Cornwell photo
Steve Jobs photo
Steve Jobs photo
William Wordsworth photo

“My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold, (1802); the last three lines of this form the introductory lines of the long Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood begun the next day.

Daniel Abraham photo

“You think we’re going to die?”
“Yup.”
“Of this?”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

“Maybe.”
Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 24 (p. 252)

Daniel Abraham photo
Johannes Kepler photo

“Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.”

Book V, Introduction
Variant translation: It may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
As quoted in The Martyrs of Science; or, the Lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler (1841) by David Brewster, p. 197. This has sometimes been misquoted as "It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer."
Variant translation: I feel carried away and possessed by an unutterable rapture over the divine spectacle of heavenly harmony... I write a book for the present time, or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred years for its readers, as God has also waited six thousand years for an onlooker.
As quoted in Calculus. Multivariable (2006) by Steven G. Krantz and Brian E. Blank. p. 126
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Harmonices Mundi (1618)

Steven Pressfield photo

“I had always wondered what it felt like to die.”

Gates of Fire (1998)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo

“Jesus Christ has to suffer and be rejected. … Suffering and being rejected are not the same. Even in his suffering Jesus could have been the celebrated Christ. Indeed, the entire compassion and admiration of the world could focus on the suffering. Looked upon as something tragic, the suffering could in itself convey its own value, its own honor and dignity. But Jesus is the Christ who was rejected in his suffering. Rejection removed all dignity and honor from his suffering. It had to be dishonorable suffering. Suffering and rejection express in summary form the cross of Jesus. Death on the cross means to suffer and to die as one rejected and cast out. It was by divine necessity that Jesus had to suffer and be rejected. Any attempt to hinder what is necessary is satanic. Even, or especially, if such an attempt comes from the circle of disciples, because it intends to prevent Christ from being Christ. The fact that it is Peter, the rock of the church, who makes himself guilty doing this just after he has confessed Jesus to be the Christ and has been commissioned by Christ, shows that from its very beginning the church has taken offense at the suffering of Christ. It does not want that kind of Lord, and as Christ's church it does not want to be forced to accept the law of suffering from its Lord.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Discipleship (1937), Discipleship and the Cross, p. 84

Richard Dawkins photo

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

Source: Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), Ch. 1 : The Anaesthetic of Familiarity; Dawkins is reported to have stated that this passage will be read at his funeral; it is often quoted with an extension which does not occur in any thus-far-checked editions of the book: "We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

Bernie Sanders photo
Ram Prasad Bismil photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Tavleen Singh photo

“When I go to the Vishwanath Mandir in Benares and listen to the most powerful, magical aarti I hear from the priests that the knowledge of it will probably die because the temple is now controlled by secular bureaucrats.”

Tavleen Singh (1950) Indian journalist

Tavleen Singh, quoted in https://talageri.blogspot.com/2016/05/hindutva-or-hindu-nationalism.html [This article is a major extract from the article "Sita Ram Goel, memories and ideas" by S. Talageri, written for the Sita Ram Goel Commemoration Volume, entitled "India's Only Communalist", edited by Koenraad Elst, published in 2005.

David Pearce (philosopher) photo

“It seems, moreover, that my argument has some relevance to choices we must make even now. There are some species of large predatory animals, such as the Siberian tiger, that are currently on the verge of extinction. If we do nothing to preserve it, the Siberian tiger as a species may soon become extinct. The number of extant Siberian tigers has been low for a considerable period. Any ecological disruption occasioned by their dwindling numbers has largely already occurred or is already occurring. If their number in the wild declines from several hundred to zero, the impact of their disappearance on the ecology of the region will be almost negligible. Suppose, however, that we could repopulate their former wide-ranging habitat with as many Siberian tigers as there were during the period in which they flourished in their greatest numbers, and that that population could be sustained indefinitely. That would mean that herbivorous animals in the extensive repopulated area would again, and for the indefinite future, live in fear and that an incalculable number would die in terror and agony while being devoured by a tiger. In a case such as this, we may actually face the kind of dilemma I called attention to in my article, in which there is a conflict between the value of preserving existing species and the value of preventing suffering and early death for an enormously large number of animals.”

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" Predators: A Response https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/predators-a-response/", The New York Times, 28 Sept. 2010

William Cobbett photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“Clearly, you could die while waiting for other people to start your life for you.”

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 254)

Halldór Laxness photo
Wendell Berry photo

“You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.
You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.
You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut my mother's hair?
I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. Their spirits will come to their bodies again. We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother.”

Smohalla (1815–1895) Native American prophet-dreamer

As quoted in The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (1890) by James Mooney on page 721; it has been sometimes also ascribed to w:Wovoka, which seems misappropriated as Mooney himself mentions Wovoka in the same book from page 765 on.
"It is perhaps the most commonly cited piece of evidence documenting the Native American belief in Mother Earth. […]They rarely place the statement in the context in which Mooney presented it, that is, the history of millenarian movements spawned in part by the pressures Native American felt from the European-Americans' insatiable desire for land […] it is a direct response to 'white' pressures placed on native relationships with the land." From Mother Earth. An American Story. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5975950.html

Mel Gibson photo
Prince photo
Larry Niven photo
Theodor Herzl photo
Joseph Addison photo

“The nurse is the night
To wake to, to die in: and the day I live,
The world and its life are her dreams.”

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

"Variations," lines 31-33
Blood for a Stranger (1942)

Bobby Sands photo
Robert Graves photo
Paavo Väyrynen photo

“Can you die of being pissed off?”

Paavo Väyrynen (1946) Finnish politician

After Väyrynen and the Center Party had lost the Finland's parliamentary election 1987.

Ray Bradbury photo
Prince photo
Plutarch photo
Plutarch photo
David Pearce (philosopher) photo
Ivan Krylov photo
Seneca the Younger photo
William Blake photo

“I die, I die!”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

the Mother said,
"My children die for lack of Bread."

The Grey Monk, stanza 1
1810s, Miscellaneous poems and fragments from the Nonesuch edition

Maria Weston Chapman photo

“If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere.”

Maria Weston Chapman (1806–1885) American abolitionist

As a mob was poised to disrupt a meeting, as quoted in [Maria Weston Chapman: American Abolitionist, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maria-Weston-Chapman, Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 January 2019]

Francis Bacon photo

“It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625), Of Death

Alexey Navalny photo

“[F]orgive me if this sounds pompous, but it’s better to die standing up than live on your knees.”

Alexey Navalny (1976) Russian anti-corruption activist

Source: As quoted in "Net Impact: One man's cyber-crusade against Russian corruption" http://archive.is/FGqQE (4 April 2011), by Julia Ioffe, The New Yorker

Ibn Hazm photo

“May God make us amongst those he allows to do good, and to practice it, and those who see the right path as none of us is without weakness; whosoever sees his weakness will forget those of others. May God make us die in the faith of Muhammad. Amen, Oh Master of the Universes.”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

ibn Hazm's style of ending a work, in Salim al-Hassani, Ibn Hazm’s Philosophy and Thoughts on Science https://muslimheritage.com/ibn-hazm-philosophy-and-science/#_ftnref23

Stokely Carmichael photo
Matthew Arnold photo
Giordano Bruno photo
Aloe Blacc photo
Paulo Coelho photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Enoch Powell photo
Dorothy Thompson photo

“I have seen a German youth camp, housing six thousand children around the age of ten, display in tree-high letters the words: ‘You were born to die for Germany!’ I have seen babies of six and seven, black-shirted and belted, march in Italy in military drill. I have seen children in Russia kindergartens taught how to adjust gas masks and the strategy of trench warfare.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 34-35