Motivational Quotes

Death

When a great man dies, for years the light he leaves behind him, lies on the paths of men.

- Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Best Quotes about Death

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet

Eliot, George

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

Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.

Ionesco, Eugene

It's no accident that the church and the graveyard stand side by side. The city of the dead sleeps encircled by the city of the living.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

Let us go in; the fog is rising.

Dickinson, Emily

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

Hazlitt, William

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.

Jarman, Derek

Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five.

Franklin, Benjamin

10.

Death is the dropping of the flower that the fruit may swell.

Beecher, Henry Ward

11.

Only the young die good.

Herford, Oliver

12.

I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.

Donne, John

13.

It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

14.

When I die, I want people to play my music, go wild and freak out and do anything they want to do.

Hendrix, Jimi

15.

To leave is to die a little... one leaves behind a little of oneself at any hour, at any place.

Haracourt, Edmond

16.

Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.

Melville, Herman

17.

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

The course of my long life hath reached at last in fragile bark over a tempestuous sea the common harbor, where must rendered be account for all the actions of the past.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

19.

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

20.

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

Huxley, Aldous

21.

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

22.

Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.

Mitford, William

23.

'Tis after death that we measure men.

Hope, James Barron

24.

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

25.

But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

Cocteau, Jean

27.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

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.

29.

As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. [Job 14:11-12]

Bible

30.

Your body must become familiar with its death -- in all its possible forms and degrees -- as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.

Hammarskjold, Dag

31.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

Eliot, George

32.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

Young, Edward

33.

He would make a lovely corpse.

Dickens, Charles

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a clown; all's fish that comes to his net; he throws at all, and sweeps stakes; he's no mower that takes a nap at noon-day, but drives on, fair weather or foul, and cuts down the green grass as well as the ripe corn: he's neither squeamish nor queesy-stomach d, for he swallows without chewing, and crams down all things into his ungracious maw; and you can see no belly he has, he has a confounded dropsy, and thirsts after men's lives, which he gurgles down like mother's milk.

Cervantes, Miguel De

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

A dead atheist is someone who is all dressed up with no place to go.

Duffecy, James

39.

The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

Lois McMaster Bujold

40.

Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.

Plutarch

41.

Be open to your dreams, people. Embrace that distant shore. Because our mortal journey is over all too soon.

David Assael

42.

There is left us ourselves to end ourselves.

William Shakespeare

43.

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

Arendt, Hannah

44.

As for death one gets used to it, even if it's only other people's death you get used to.

Bagnold, Enid

45.

Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.

Dowell, Coleman

46.

Few cross the river of time and are able to reach non-being. Most of them run up and down only on this side of the river. But those who when they know the law follow the path of the law, they shall reach the other shore and go beyond the realm of death.

Dhammapada

47.

A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass.

Thrale, Hester i

48.

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

Epicurus

49.

Life is one of the most important causes of death.

Kocher, Gerhard

50.

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.