Death Quotes

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Fear of death makes us devoid both of valour and religion. For want of valour is want of religious faith.

Another illustration. When for the first time I met Mister Clay, the other day in the cars, in front of us sat an old gentleman with an enormous wen upon his neck. Everybody would say the wen was a great evil, and would cause the man's death after a while. But you couldn't cut it out, for he'd bleed to death in a minute. But would you engraft the seeds of that wen on the necks of sound and healthy men? He must endure and be patient, hoping for possible relief. The wen represents slavery on the neck of this country. This only applies to those who think slavery is wrong. Those who think it right would consider the snake a jewel, and the wen an ornament.

Abraham Lincoln

There is no way to escape death, it is just like trying to escape by four great mountains touching sky. There is no escape from these four mountains of birth, old age, sickness and death.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

On the death of his daughter, who suffered from Down's Syndrome:

And now she is like everyone else.

Charles de Gaulle

Death is at any time blessed but it is twice blessed for a warrior who dies for his cause, that is, truth.

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

Simone de Beauvoir

At all times it has not been the age, but individuals alone, who have worked for knowledge. It was the age which put Socrates to death by poison, the age which burnt Huss. The ages have always remained alike.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity, and I saw that, not two or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these people were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing.

'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,' said cunning old Fury;
'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.'

Bursts as a wave that from the clouds impends, And swell'd with tempests on the ship descends; White are the decks with foam; the winds aloud Howl o'er the masts, and sing through every shroud: Pale, trembling, tir'd, the sailors freeze with fears; And instant death on every wave appears.

For them that think death's honesty won't fall upon them naturally life sometimes must get lonely.

O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.

Leonardo da Vinci

Then they told me about the call from home and that they were taking the threats seriously. I don't know why, but hearing I was being targeted did not worry me. It seemed to me that everyone knows they will die one day. My feeling was nobody can stop death; it doesn't matter if it comes from a Talib or cancer. So I should do whatever I want to do.

Malala Yousafzai

Then is it sin to rush into the secret house of death. Ere death dare come to us?

William Shakespeare

The very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.

If you really come down to any large story that interests people – holds the attention for a considerable time... human stories are practically always about one thing, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable.

Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.

Animals whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. — Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind? — animals with affections, imitation, fear of death, pain, sorrow for the dead. — respect.

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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Natasha and I said more than once that one may arrive at such a physical condition that it would be better to cut short one's own life or, more correctly, the too slow process of dying … But whatever may be the circumstances of my death I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion.

Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man's grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition.

I cannot conceive of anything after my physical death—perhaps it will end it all. The knowledge that I am now on this earth and a mysterious part of eternity is enough for me. My death will be an easy one, too, for since early youth I have always detached myself from family, friends, and surroundings. And should I live on, I have no fear of the next life. Whatever good I did helped to free me from myself. What a miserable creature man would be if he were good not for the sake of being good, but because religion told him that he would get a reward after this life, and that if he weren't good he'd be punished.

Albert Einstein

For after death, as they say, the genius of each individual, to whom he belonged in life, leads him to a certain place in which the dead are gathered together for judgment, whence they go into the world below, following the guide who is appointed to conduct them from this world to the other; and when they have there received their due and remained their time, another guide brings them back again after many revolutions of ages.