Motivational Quotes

Death

Against self-slaughter there is a prohibition so divine that cravens my weak hand.

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Death

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

Camus, Albert

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

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

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

An evil life is a kind of death.

Ovid

To awake from death is to die in peace.

Horton, Doug

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

An orphan's curse would drag to hell, a spirit from on high; but oh! more horrible than that, is a curse in a dead man's eye!

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

Plato

10.

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

11.

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

Young, Edward

12.

Let no man fear to die, we love to sleep all, and death is but the sounder sleep.

Beaumont, Francis

13.

In the last analysis it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions life puts to us.

Hammarskjold, Dag

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

Butler, Samuel

16.

Nothing that is really good and God-like dies.

Arndt, Ernest Moritz

17.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Macarthur, Douglas

18.

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

Gray, Thomas

19.

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

20.

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

Dryden, John

21.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

The fear of death is worse than death.

Burton, Robert

23.

If only I could understand the reason for my crying. If only I could stop this fear of dreaming that I'm dying.

Palmer, Laura

24.

There's a thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die; their silence.

Becht, Ben

25.

It hath often been said that it is not death but dying that is terrible.

Fielding, Henry

26.

We should weep for men at their birth, not at their death.

Montesquieu, Charles De

27.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Frost, Robert

28.

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.

29.

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.

30.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Luther, Martin

31.

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

32.

To die is landing on some distant shore.

Dryden, John

33.

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

34.

He would make a lovely corpse.

Dickens, Charles

35.

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

Hook, Sydney

36.

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

37.

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Heidegger, Martin

38.

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

Euripides

39.

We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

Browne, Sir Thomas

40.

Is there a life after death? Can I never get some peace?

Kocher, Gerhard

41.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

Aurelius, Marcus

42.

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

Johnny Carson

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.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Bacon, Francis

45.

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.

46.

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

King Jr. Martin Luther

48.

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

49.

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

Diderot, Denis

50.

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