DEATH

Many of my quotations from "life" are equally suitable for "death" and as such are seen in both sections.
Such an intensely private thing, we should not avoid the inevitability of our deaths.

Life and death are but phases of the same thing, the reverse and obverse of the same coin...
I want you all to treasure death and suffering more than life and to appreciate their cleansing and purifying character. Death which is an Eternal verity is revolution,
as birth and after is slow and steady evolution.
Death is as necessary for man's growth as life itself.
Mohandes Karamchand Gandhi
Young India

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all."
William Shakespeare
King Lear

The sun exactly at noon is exactly [beginning to] go down.
And a creature when he is born is exactly [beginning to] die.
Hu Shih
Chinese Philosophy

The scorn of death is again one of the methods of prolonging life...
The best way not to die too soon is to cultivate the duties of life and the scorn of death.
Alexander A. Bogomoletz
The Prolongation of Life

He begins to die, that quits his desires.
He that fears death lives not.
George Herbert
Outlandish Proverbs

To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living beings...
If you would endure life, be prepared for death.
Sigmund Freud
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death

Many die too late, and some die too early.
Yet strangers soundeth the precept: "Die at the right time!"
Frederick Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Pale Death knocks with impartial foot at poor men's hovels and kings' palaces.
Horace
Odes

Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark...
Francis Bacon
"Of Death"

The whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of death.
Samuel Johnson
quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson

Do not seek death. Death will find you.
But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.
Dag Hammarskjold
Markings

Death hangs over thee.
While thou still live, while thou may, do good.
Marcus Aurelius Antonious
Meditations

If your time ain't come, not even a doctor can kill you.
American proverb

A good death does honor to a whole life.
Petrarch
Rime in Vila e Morte di Madonna Laura

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
Henry David Thoreau

No one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way,
that in the unconscious every man of us convinced of his own immortality.
Sigmund Freud
The Interpretation of Dreams

In the midst of life we are in death.
Book of Common Prayer
Anglican Church

This fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest.
William Shakespeare
Hamlet

Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead. I will measure exactly the sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals.
William E. Gladstone
attributed

A person who can break wind is not dead.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Death is psychologically as important as birth...Shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
Carl Gustav Jung
quoted in Time, obituary, June 16, 1961

For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
Oscar Wilde

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar

The wise man looks at death with honesty, dignity and calm, recognizing
that the tragedy it brings is inherent in the great gift of life.
Corliss Lamont
Journal of Philosophy, January, 1965

He who would teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.
Michel Eyquen Montaigne
Essays

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.
Samuel Johnson

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
It is sweet and glorious to die for one's country.
Horace
Odes

Cowards die many times before their deaths, patriots die just once.

Death is not the greatest of evils; it is worse to want to die, and not be able to.
Sophocles
Electra

There is only one thing that a brave and honest man - a gentleman - should be afraid of. And that is death. He should carry the fear of death forever in his heart - for that ends all glory,
and he should use it as a spur to ride his life across the barriers.
Thomas Wolfe
letter to his mother

Love makes up poets and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
George Santayana
The Sense of Beauty

Whom the gods favor die young.
Plautus

The soul-stirring image of death is no bugbear to the sage, and is looked on without despair by the pious. It teaches the former to live, and it strengthens the hopes of the latter in salvation in the midst of distress. Death is new life to both.
Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
Herman and Dorothea

We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.
Victor Hugo
quoted in Walter Pater The Renaissance

It is not death that alarms me, but dying.
Michel de Montaigne

'Tis a vile thing to die, my gracious lord,
When men are unprepared and look not for it.
William Shakespeare
Richard III

We are all in a race for dear life: that is to say, we are all fugitives from life.
Theodore Reik
The Need to be Loved

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
Eric Hoffer

Animals learn death first at the moment of death;...man approaches death with the knowledge it is closer every hour, and this creates a feeling of uncertainty over his life, even for him who forgets in the business of life that annihilation is awaiting him.
It is for this reason chiefly that we have philosophy and religion.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The World as Will and Idea

Sleep is good; death is better; however, it would be best never to have been born.
Heinrich Heine
Morphine

The greatest crime of all is to have been born.
Calderon de la Barca La Vida es Sueno

Hell and Heaven are near man, yes, in him; and every man after death goes to that Hell or that Heaven in which he was, or to his spirit, during his abode in the world.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Heaven and Hell

Omnia mors aequat.
Death levels all.
Claudian
De Raptu Proserpinae

Cry, woe, and destruction, ruin and decay;
The worst is death, and death will have his day.
William Shakespeare
Richard III