quotations about death
God, give us each our own death,
the dying that proceeds
from each of our lives.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
The Book of Hours
A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most people live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.
DEAN KOONTZ
The Husband
Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!
IRVIN D. YALOM
When Nietzsche Wept
Now can it be men die and carry thence no memory of death, only this curious lightness of the hands, only this curious darkness of the mind, only to be still changeless with the winters passing; not gray, not lined, not stricken down, but stamped forever on the moving air, and echo and an image?
MAXWELL ANDERSON
High Tor
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
Death, like generation, is a secret of Nature.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
A Treatise on Parents and Children
There is great reason to hope that death is good; for one of two things -- either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man ... even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?
PLATO
The Apology
That death is not to be judged an evil which is the end of a good life; for death becomes evil only by the retribution which follows it.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
When death occurs, death as you know it, the universe embraces you and takes you to its heart.
ROSEMARY ALTEA
A Matter of Life and Death
I think ... that I when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I lived, the breath I breathed.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Other Wind
The attitude of mourning is a faithless attitude, an ignorant attitude. The more we know, the more fully we shall trust, for we shall feel with utter certainty that we and our dead are alike in the hands of perfect Power and perfect Wisdom, directed by perfect Love.
C. W. LEADBEATER
The Science of the Sacraments
Dead man, dead man
When will you arise?
Cobwebs in your mind
Dust upon your eyes
BOB DYLAN
"Dead Man, Dead Man"
When I cannot stand alone, it will be time to die.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"Rogues in the House"
Mark, how the ready hands of Death prepare:
His bow is bent, and he hath notch'd his dart;
He aims, he levels at thy slumb'ring heart:
The wound is posting, O be wise, beware.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
No man knows where the Castle of King Death is. All men and women, boys and girls, and even little wee children should so live that when they have to enter the Castle and see the grim King, they may not fear to behold his face.
BRAM STOKER
"Under the Sunset"
The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
STEVE JOBS
Commencement address at Stanford University, Jun. 12, 2005