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
All mankinde is of one Author, and is
one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the
book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must
be so translated; God emploies several translators; some peeces are
translated by age, some by sicknesse, some by warre, some by justice;
but God's hand is in every translation; and his hand shall binde
up all our scattered leaves againe, for that Libraries where every
booke shall lie open to one another.
No man is an Iland intire of itselfe; every man is a
peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the
Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a promontorie were, as well as if a mannor
of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death dimnishes me, because I
am involoved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell
tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne Devotions
Your death and my death are mainly of importance
to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within
the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow
level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags
on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first
strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.
Alexander C. Swinburne Super Flumina Babylonis
But soon we shall die and all memory of
those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved
for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all
those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory
is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land
of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thorton Wilder The Bridge of San Luis Rey
