Motivational Quotes

Death

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

- Leonardo da Vinci

Best Quotes about Death

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

Donne, John

All that tread, the globe are but a handful to the tribes, that slumber in its bosom.

Bryant, William C.

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

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

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

Gray, Thomas

The killing was the best part. It was the dying I couldn't take.

Craig Volk

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

He was exhaled; his great Creator drew His spirit, as the sun the morning dew.

Dryden, John

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

King Jr. Martin Luther

10.

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

11.

Is it sin to rush into the secret house of death, ere death dare come to us?

William Shakespeare

12.

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

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.

How long after you are gone will ripples remain as evidence that you were cast into the pool of life?

Bright, Grant M.

15.

For 'Tis not in mere death that men die most.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

16.

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

17.

Along with the lazy man... the dying man is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others.

Certeau, Michel De

18.

The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life.

Lucan, F. L.

19.

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

20.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

Lawrence, D. H.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Death may be the King of terrors... but Jesus is the King of kings!

Moody, Dwight L.

24.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Camus, Albert

25.

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

26.

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

27.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.

Woody Allen

28.

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

Plato

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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

34.

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

Butler, Samuel

35.

So every bondman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.

William Shakespeare

36.

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.

Mann, Thomas

37.

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

Gide, Andre

38.

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

Greene, Graham

39.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

Butler, Samuel

40.

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

Picabia, Francis

41.

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

Keats, John

42.

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.

43.

I hope the leaving is joyful; and I hope never to return.

Frida Kahlo

44.

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.

Merton, Thomas

45.

'Tis after death that we measure men.

Hope, James Barron

46.

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

Epicurus

47.

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

48.

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

Butler, Samuel

49.

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

Davis, Mrs Hubbard

50.

Loss and possession, Death and life are one. There falls no shadow where There shines no sun.

Belloc, Hilaire