Motivational Quotes

Death

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

Best Quotes about Death

He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.

Canetti, Elias

Death is feared as birth is forgotten.

Horton, Doug

I am ready to meet my maker, but whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Churchill, Winston

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

Bagnold, Enid

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?

Lewis, C. S.

A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.

Aeschylus

For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

Carson, Johnny

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

10.

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

11.

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

Keats, John

12.

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

Donne, John

13.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Eliot, George

14.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Da Vinci, Leonardo

15.

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

16.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Bacon, Francis

17.

The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.

Publilius Syrus

18.

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

19.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

Auden, W. H.

20.

If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party.

Hammarskjold, Dag

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Death is the enemy. I spent 10 years of my life singlemindedly studying, practicing, fighting hand to hand in close quarters to defeat the enemy, to send him back bloodied and humble and I am not going to roll over and surrender.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

24.

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

25.

'Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o'er the pate, or a kick of the guts; to go out like the snuff of a farthing candle, and die merely of the mulligrubs, or the sullens.

Cervantes, Miguel De

26.

It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune.

Woody Allen

27.

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

28.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Hauer, Rutger

29.

Only the young die good.

Herford, Oliver

30.

My idea of walking into the jaws of death is marrying some woman who has lost three husbands.

Hubbard, Kin

31.

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

George Burns

32.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

33.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Eliot, T. S.

34.

When I pass, speak freely of my shortcomings and my flaws. Learn from them, for I'll have no ego to injure.

Aaron McGruder

35.

When we die, no one remembers us for what we weighed. Our weight isn't etched into our headstones.

Stephanie Klein

36.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

Horace

37.

There is no death. the stars go down to rise upon some other shore. And bright in Heaven's jeweled crown, they shine for ever more.

Mccreery, John Luckey

38.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Aurelius, Marcus

39.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

40.

I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.

Cary, Joyce

41.

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

Gray, Thomas

42.

Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

Lincoln, Abraham

43.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

44.

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

Diderot, Denis

45.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. My advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

46.

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

47.

Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.

Hook, Sydney

48.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Cicero, Marcus T.

49.

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

Picabia, Francis

50.

At birth man is offered only one choice --the choice of his death. But if this choice is governed by distaste for his own existence, his life will never have been more than meaningless.

Melville, Jean-Pierre