quotations about death
Always be thou prepared, and so live that death may never find thee unprepared.
THOMAS A. KEMPIS
The Imitation of Christ
Death fosters life that life may suckle death.
SRI AUROBINDO
Vasavadutta
Death ... was the only kept promise out of all life's false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
The thought of death deceives us; for it causes us to neglect to live.
LUC DE CLAPIERS
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES, Reflections and Maxims
I dream of the face of Death. It's an ever-changing face, worn by many at the wrong time, worn by all eventually.
CODY MCFADYEN
The Face of Death
In every cradle decked with rosy wreath
Lurk germs of death.
VICTOR HUGO
"Hope"
Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
Death strips all men of dignity.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
When a man has the rope about his neck, you don't ask him about his health!
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Better to live or die, once and for all, than die by inches.
HOMER
The Iliad
Flirting with death is the spice of life.
MARGARET LOCK
Twice Dead
If thou hadst a good conscience thou wouldst not greatly fear death.
THOMAS A. KEMPIS
The Imitation of Christ
In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown. This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Salon Magazine
How dreadful is the prospect of death, at the remotest distance! how the smallest apprehensions of it can pall the most gay, airy, and brisk spirits! even I, who thought I could have been merry in sight of my coffin, and drink a health with the sexton in my own grave, now tremble at the least envoy of the king of terrors. To see but the shaking of my glass makes me turn pale ... all the jollity of my humour and conversation is turned on a sudden into chagrin and melancholy, black as despair, and gloomy as the grave.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Death ends at last the fear of it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!
GEORGE ELIOT
Amos Barton
It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Man dies, his white bones are dumb without a word
When the green pines feel the coming of spring.
Looking back, I sigh; looking before, I sigh again.
What is there to prize in the life's vaporous glory?
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
Death is everywhere
The more I look
The more I see
The more I feel
A sense of urgency
Tonight
DEPECHE MODE
"Fly on the Windscreen"