quotations about death
When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment.
MASAO ABE
A Study of Dogen: His Philosophy and Religion
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
OSCAR WILDE
The Canterville Ghost
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
HORACE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
The seeds of Death are sown in us when we begin to live, and grow up till, like rampant weeds, they choak the tender flower of life.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Clarissa
Death
As a dark Shadow
Beckons his prey
Into the unknown
By a soft whisper
In the soul
CINDY CHENEY
"Death"
The fear of death has been raised too much and set up on high, especially by preachers, like the brazen serpent in the wilderness over the heads of the Israelites; but not with so good excuse as that symbol had, for this fear has not been curative, I think, nor made into pleasant or graceful shape, but rather a horrid spectacle, to affright people. For that men can be frightened into piety has been one of the legacies of religion which barbarous ages have bequeathed us plentifully.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
If the matter of death is reduced to sleep and rest, what can there be so bitter in it, that any one should pine in eternal grief for the decease of a friend?
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Whatever is certain in death is slightly alleviated by what is not so infallible; the time when it shall happen is undefined, but it is more or less connected with the infinite, and what we call eternity.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
When do the dead die? When they are forgotten.
LAURA ESQUIVEL
The Law of Love
What is Death? Death is the ending of life. When people die, their bodies stop working. The heart stops beating and the brain stops functioning. People have always wanted to learn the secret of living forever. In ancient times, explorers and scientists searched for the secret of eternal life. The truth is, nothing can live forever. Everyone and everything will die in time. Plants, animals, and people all die. Death is a natural part of life.
JOANNE MATTERN
Death
Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.
RITA MAE BROWN
Hounded to Death
To take life was to understand your own death--that the Hour of the Huntsman also came for you.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider"
In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
CHARLES FROHMAN
his last words before going down on the Lusitania
He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
JACK LONDON
White Fang
If a man should wanton walk with crime ... he shall find in death no great deliverance.
AESCHYLUS
The Eumenides
Life was to these a dream fulfilled,
And death a starry night.
HERMAN MELVILLE
"Chattanooga"