Motivational Quotes

Death

He would make a lovely corpse.

- Dickens, Charles

Best Quotes about Death

To die is landing on some distant shore.

Dryden, John

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

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

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

Plato

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

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Hesse, Hermann

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

Carson, Johnny

He has gone over to the majority.

Petronius

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

10.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

11.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. [Psalm 23:4]

Bible

12.

'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

13.

Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

14.

Death can sneak up on you like a silent kitten, surprising you with it's touch and you have a right to act surprised. Other times death stomps in the front door, unwanted and unannounced, and makes it's noisy way to your seat on the sofa.

Hugh Elliott

15.

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

Milton, John

16.

Let us go in; the fog is rising.

Dickinson, Emily

17.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

I hate funerals and would not attend my own if it could be avoided, but it is well for every man to stop once in a while to think of what sort of a collection of mourners he is training for his final event.

Morris, Robert T.

21.

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

Horace

22.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

Dickinson, Emily

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

25.

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

Browne, Sir Thomas

26.

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

Moody, Dwight L.

27.

Man has the possibility of existence after death. But possibility is one thing and the realization of the possibility is quite a different thing.

Gurdjieff, George

28.

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

29.

When you lose someone you love, you die too, and you wait around for your body to catch up.

John Scalzi

30.

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

31.

The death of what's dead is the birth of what's living.

Guthrie, Arlo

32.

Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.

Maclaren, Alexander

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.

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

35.

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

36.

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

Miller, Henry

37.

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

38.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

Woody Allen

39.

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

40.

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

Heidegger, Martin

41.

We are all dead men on leave.

Levine, Eugene

42.

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

43.

We need not fear life, because God is the Ruler of all and we need not fear death, because He shares immortality with us.

Landers, Ann

44.

A useless life is an early death.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

46.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Bacon, Francis

47.

If life must not be taken too seriously -- then so neither must death.

Butler, Samuel

48.

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.

49.

Death doesn't frighten me.

Diana, Princess of Wales

50.

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

Woody Allen