Motivational Quotes

Death

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.

- Jonathan Swift

Best Quotes about Death

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

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Canetti, Elias

To awake from death is to die in peace.

Horton, Doug

To be born free is an accident; To live free a responsibility; To die free is an obligation.

Davis, Mrs Hubbard

Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.

Colton, Charles Caleb

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

Durrell, Lawrence

We all of us waited for him to die. The family sent him a check every month, and hoped he'd get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss.

Osborne, John

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

10.

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

11.

Being prepared for loss is never the same as being ready for it.

Randy K. Milholland

12.

Don't strew me with roses after I'm dead. When Death claims the light of my brow No flowers of life will cheer me: instead You may give me my roses now!

Healey, Thomas F.

13.

Remember man as you walk by, as you are now so once was I, as I am now, so you will be, so prepare for death and follow me.

Epitaph

14.

Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity.

Milton, John

15.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

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

Horace

17.

'Tis all a Checker-board of Nights and days where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates and slays, and one by one back in the Closet lays.

Khayyam, Omar

18.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

Steve Jobs

19.

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

King Jr. Martin Luther

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means.

Oscar Wilde

23.

Nothing that is really good and God-like dies.

Arndt, Ernest Moritz

24.

Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He comet up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

Book Of Common Prayer

25.

Plan for this world as if you expect to live forever; but plan for the hereafter as if you expect to die tomorrow.

Gabirol, Ibn

26.

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

Publilius Syrus

27.

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

Hook, Sydney

28.

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

Eliot, George

29.

The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water. It flows down, clean and cool, from the heights of Herman and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon. the Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it, the Sea of Galilee has an outlet. It gets to give. It gathers in its riches that it may pour them out again to fertilize the Jordan plain. But the Dead Sea with the same water makes horror. For the Dead Sea has no outlet. It gets to keep.

Fosdick, Harry Emerson

30.

'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

31.

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

32.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

Plato

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Plato

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

Death is like an arrow that is already in flight, and your life lasts only until it reaches you.

Hermes, Georg

40.

We are but tenants and shortly the great landlord will give us notice that our lease has expired.

Jefferson, Joseph

41.

To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.

Auerbach, Red

42.

Living is death; dying is life. We are not what we appear to be. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that citizens; on this side orphans, on that children;

Beecher, Henry Ward

43.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

Antonin Artaud

44.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

45.

Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.

Gide, Andre

46.

Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.