Motivational Quotes

Death

Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred --it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death is the greatest assayer of the sterling ore of talent. At his touch the dropsy particles fall off, the irritable, the personal, the gross, and mingle with the dust --the finer and more ethereal part mounts with winged spirit to watch over our latest memory, and protect our bones from insult. We consign the least worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish the nobler and imperishable nature with double pride and fondness.

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Death

Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.

Herodotus

To die is landing on some distant shore.

Dryden, John

The Father is the Giver of Life; but the Mother is the Giver of Death, because her womb is the gate of ingress to matter, and through her life is ensouled to form, and no form can be either infinite or eternal. Death is implicit in birth.

Kabbalah

Pale death with an impartial foot knocks at the hovels of the poor and the palaces of king.

Horace

We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning.

Manilius, Marcus

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

Chopra, Deepak

So that he seemed not to relinquish life, but to leave one home for another.

Nepos, Cornelius

The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?

James, Alice

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.

Diderot, Denis

11.

O how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living.

Philip II

12.

I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.

Darrow, Clarence

13.

A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.

Berger, John

14.

When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin.

Donleavy, J. P.

15.

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Gray, Thomas

16.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

Butler, Samuel

17.

I hate funerals and would not attend my own if it could be avoided, but it is well for every man to stop once in a while to think of what sort of a collection of mourners he is training for his final event.

Morris, Robert T.

18.

Death doesn't frighten me.

Diana, Princess of Wales

19.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

Well, there's a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.

Cervantes, Miguel De

21.

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

Greene, Graham

22.

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

Miller, Henry

23.

Oh you who have been removed from God in his solitude by the abyss of time, how can you expect to reach him without dying?

Hallaj

24.

He had been, he said, an unconscionable time dying; but he hoped that they would excuse it.

Charles II

25.

The fact that when we die we are nothing more than worm meat---I just don't think about it.

Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess

26.

At death we cross from one territory to another, but we'll have no trouble with visas. Our representative is already there, preparing for our arrival. As citizens of heaven, our entrance is incontestable.

Lutzer, Erwin W.

27.

We are all dead men on leave.

Levine, Eugene

28.

No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.

Broch, Hermann

29.

There is some comfort in dying surrounded by one's children.

Ann Radcliffe

30.

You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.

Havner, Vance

31.

Death is the great adventure beside which moon landings and space trips pale into insignificance.

Bayly, Joseph

32.

Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. [Psalms 39:4]

Bible

33.

Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.

Arnold, Matthew

34.

If some persons died, and others did not die, death would be a terrible affliction.

La Bruyere, Jean De

35.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Hesse, Hermann

36.

Either he's dead or my watch has stopped.

Marx, Groucho

37.

Most of us die with much of our beautiful music still in us, un-sung, un-played.

Bright, Grant M.

38.

Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

39.

It is hard to have patience with people who say There is no death or Death doesn't matter. There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

Lewis, C. S.

40.

Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.

Bronte, Emily

41.

I'd rather die while I'm living then live while I'm dead.

Buffett, Jimmy

42.

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

Picabia, Francis

43.

As virtuous men pass mildly away, and whisper to their souls to go, whilst some of their sad friends do say, the breath goes now, and some say no.

Donne, John

44.

I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.

Edith Sitwell

45.

I have seen a thousand graves opened, and always perceived that whatever was gone, the teeth and hair remained of those who had died with them. Is not this odd? They go the very first things in youth and yet last the longest in the dust.

Byron, Lord

46.

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

47.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

Baldwin, James

48.

But learn that to die is a debt we must all pay.

Euripides

49.

He whom the Gods love dies young, while he is in health, has his senses and his judgments sound.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

50.

If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.

George Burns