Top 100 On Death Quotes
#1. The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#2. The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The "death play" of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels.
Richard J. Borden
#3. Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments. - LEON KASS, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003
Ray Kurzweil
#4. It's life, that's all. There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there's not a thing you can do about it.
Jonathan Tropper
#5. Are you congratulating me on my life, or on my death?
Ally Condie
#6. The death I should prefer would be to break my neck off the back of a good horse at a full gallop on a fine day.
Fanny Kemble
#7. If you look at your class as anything less than life or death, you do not deserve to be a teacher. If you walk into the classroom ten minutes late, week after week, you need to resign. You wouldn't come in late on your job all the time, but I venture to guess that some of you do it on Sunday.
Bill Wilson
#8. When you've had a near-death experience, your life is never the same. A divine fire is supernaturally transferred into your soul, to tell everyone about your encounter. This in itself, is a miracle. As such, I am on a mission to rid hell of its future recruits.
Josephine Akhagbeme
#9. The celebration of Holy Mass is as valuable as the death of Jesus on the cross.
Thomas Aquinas
#10. I am not knocking advances that provide a healthier life and alleviate suffering or unnecessary premature death. I am advocating inclusion of education on end-of-life matters and the promotion of understanding, conversation, and planning.
Lisa J. Shultz
#11. I experienced a lot of loss after his death. I lost my city because of all the paparazzi descending upon us. I actually lost my journal during that time, oddly enough. I literally couldn't hold on to anything.
Michelle Williams
#12. Churchill often reflected on this near-death episode and the effect of chance. 'You may walk to the right or to the left of a particular tree, and it makes the difference whether you rise to command an Army Corps or are sent home crippled or paralysed for life.
Phil Mason
#13. You're the right colour for the Angel of Death, Mister Cale. But a little short.' 'I could cut your head off and stand on it. Then I'd be taller.
Paul Hoffman
#14. I'm here. Soon I won't be. Zoey's baby is here. Its pulse tick-ticking. Soon it won't be. And when Zoey comes out of that room, having signed on the dotted line, she'll be different. She'll understand what I already know- that death surrounds us all.
And it tastes like metal between you teeth.
Jenny Downham
#15. It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before father's death on a cold wet day.
Shirley Jackson
#16. But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that (as Burley Coulter used to say) we've all got to go through enough to kill us.
Wendell Berry
#17. Bodies are just leftovers, not the real event on death.
Kat Richardson
#18. It doesn't matter if you have a desperate heart when you have to sing about joy; it doesn't matter if you're scared to death when the lights go on.
Mireille Mathieu
#19. He's weak, afraid and dumber than your dog.
Besides, you gonna bet the farm on a pig?
The Alien Club
Trel Sidoruk
#20. Putting black cloths on the hives is for us. I do it to remind us that life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life.
Sue Monk Kidd
#21. My fans are all pretty cool, you know; I've never really seen anybody fighting on Twitter, no death threats, no harsh language, no gay slurs, nothing like that.
Drake Bell
#23. There is no part of the whole course of our Saviour Christ's life or death, but it is well worthy our looking on; and from each part in it there goeth virtue to do us good.
Lancelot Andrewes
#24. What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.
George Pierce Baker
#25. 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.
Henry Miller
#26. I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats. (On the KKK)
Woody Allen
#27. You're never so alive as when you're on the verge of death.
Simon Kernick
#29. I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much ... so, so much.
Jacqueline Woodson
#30. Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be
Others will go on speaking and you will not be able to argue back
Ram Mohan Roy
#31. This is what I'm going to remember on the day I die," he said. "Right before I close my eyes, I'm going to remember this, the way your hand feels, the heat of your leg against mine, the smell of the skin on the back of your neck, like burnt sugar.
Sarah Black
#32. Of all footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.
Gautama Buddha
#33. On your death bed, you will not wish you had been more comfortable, or that you had found an even easier, softer pleasure zone to hide out in. You will wish you had ventured out more. That you had spoken up more. Tried some things. Reinvented yourself one more time.
Steve Chandler
#34. You'll never truly know what alone is, until you're on the brink of death with no one to rely on. But after finding the strength to save yourself, you realize that the person you'll ever need is yourself.
Gabriel Common
#35. I thought not only am I going to die, but it's going to be just a torturous death that's going to go on forever
Lara Logan
#36. They shouldn't call death passing on. They should call it leveling up. Because the game only got harder once I lost. And I was more than a little worried it had only just begun.
Kami Garcia
#37. Awoke to find three vultures sitting on the fence. Realizing they were a portent of impending death I shot them.
Bridget Allison
#38. Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Ronald Schaffer
#39. Far too often, it is at the moment where we finally stand on the very precipice of some great thing that we turn and abandon it, for it is at these seminal moments that fear wins and greatness dies. The beauty of Christmas is that God steps over precipices.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#40. You may not have money, you may not have medicine, you may not have miracles, but you do have words, and they can produce life, or death depending on how you use them.
Rick Cochran
#41. If you think about it, Washington's overwhelming power in the world is founded on death, the awesome arsenal for killing people.
William Greider
#42. If you knew you were going to die, wasn't it better to choose the time and place, instead of waiting for fate to drop on you like an anvil?
Jodi Picoult
#43. I think one thing that kids who grow up on farms really have going for them is they have exposure to death and birth in a totally different way. I think it takes away a little bit of the mystery and a little bit of the fear, and I do wish I had that. And I wish I was able to grow my own food.
Rachel McAdams
#45. 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.
John Osborne
#46. And what shall we know of this life on earth after death? The dissolution of our timebound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. Rather, does the little finger know itself a member of the hand.
Carl Jung
#47. I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.
Gary Shteyngart
#48. Dying only means moving into a nicer house.
We have only gone into the next room.
We still are what we have always been.
We aren't far away. We are only on the other side of the pathway.
Kerry Okines
#49. Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.
Gustave Flaubert
#50. any society or government that relies too heavily on technology will find itself perched perilously on a crumbling precipice over the valley of death and destruction.
Michael Bunker
#51. To tell you the truth, there are all these websites predicting my early death, and it's starting to work on me!
Artie Lange
#52. Death was temporary, lasting only long enough to provoke a laugh from kids in pajamas sitting cross-legged in front of the TV set, gorging themselves on handfuls of Froot Loops.
Agatha Christie
#53. Our situation was so desperate that only the death of His own Son on a cruel and shameful cross was sufficient to resolve the problem.
Jerry Bridges
#54. Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?
Jeff Lindsay
#55. You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.
Tim O'Brien
#56. don't fast, I will never go on any pilgrimage, and I drink wine - and what's more, the air that makes it better. To cry out that I'm free, and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth.
Kamel Daoud
#57. This plan looks like foolishness to earthbound philosophers. How can man comprehend a plan so based on love and servitude that his own deliverance and restoration is achieved by the death of the very "Lord of glory" (2:8)?
Albert H. Baylis
#58. On him does death lie heavily, who, but too well known to all, dies to himself unknown.
Seneca The Younger
#59. It is that something in the soul which says, - Rage on, whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere; master of the spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea, master of nature and passion and death, and of all terror and all pain.
Walt Whitman
#60. Sometimes I have to compromise my views, but I never compromise on issues like the death penalty and the arm trade laws, despite what the readers or letters may say.
Jonathan Shapiro
#61. Mamie told me living rooms were once known as death rooms, back when funerals were a home matter. After mortuaries came into fashion, there was no need for keeping bodies on ice at home, and the death room was rechristened the living room.
Sarah Jude
#62. It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was dying. Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but indubitably dying. Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little crack in a pitcher.
John Buchan
#63. And to die with the Warrior's Prayer on his lips. For, 'Yes', he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life. Acceptance.
Robin Hobb
#64. Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.
Herman Melville
#65. I prefer to doubt everything. Such a disposition does not preclude a resolute character. On the contrary, as far as I am concerned, I always advance more boldly when I don't know what is waiting me for me. After all, nothing worse than death can happen-and death you can't escape!
Mikhail Lermontov
#66. Actually it deals ("as usual" I was about to say!) with Life, Love and Death. Because nothing in fact is more important. To occupy oneself with. To think of. To worry over. To be happy about. And so on.
Ingmar Bergman
#67. Too strong a media emphasis on death and violence can lead to despair.
Dalai Lama
#68. Defeating the enemy through deception with little loss of life is better than fighting face-to-face with the loss of many lives on both sides.
Aleksandra Layland
#69. If the death of Osama Bin Laden brings any peace to those who lost loved ones on that awful day in September 2001, that is a great thing. It is more likely, however, just a painful reminder of what was lost.
Henry Rollins
#70. Madness doesn't get off wearing gloves. It needs to feel skin on skin, smell the blood and shit as it brings itself off.
Benjamin R. Smith
#71. I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel.
Jack Kerouac
#72. The ice cold fear I'd felt, not knowing if Wyatt was alive, pressed into the wall with other girls and surrounded by guys who were unspeakably brave, hit my body again in a wave. This was trauma - the gift that keeps on giving.
Laura Anderson Kurk
#73. Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene:
"Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please"
This also became Conrad's epitaph.
Joseph Conrad
#74. A parting is sadder than a death, Ma always said, for two people are dead to one another and yet go on living ...
Caroline Pafford Miller
#75. On the church vaulting above was the clock-face of eternity, void of number and serving as its own hand, only one black finger was pointing and the dead wanted to tell the time by it.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
#76. But let my death be memoried on this disc.
Wear it, sweet friend. Inscribe no date nor deed.
But let thy heart-beat kiss it night and day,
Until the name grow vague and wear away.
Wilfred Owen
#77. To those looking on with interest, and there were plenty of gawking eyes fixed on her, she supposed she appeared to be gliding with ease. But in truth, the crushing weight of her charmed life made each demure step as tortuous as a death march.
Carey Baldwin
#78. Ere yet we yearn for what is out of our reach, we are still in the cradle. When wearied out with our yearnings, desire again falls asleep; we are on the death-bed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#79. The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.
Jen Pollock Michel
#80. In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.
Herman Melville
#81. When you said hold the ice ... "
"I thought you were near death over there," I answer, breathless. "That doesn't feel fatal."
"I was, but you are one hot chick when you pound on the right bag." He jerks me back against him hard and I yelp. Not in pain. No, definitely not pain.
K.A. Tucker
#82. Death cuts off possibilities. Even if they were possibilities you never meant to act on, it feels different
when they're gone.
Eileen Wilks
#83. For the author there is nothing but his pen, till that and life are worn to the stump: and then, with good fortune, perhaps on his death-bed he receives a pension and equals, it may be, for a few months, the income of a retired butler!
Samuel Laman Blanchard
#84. With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming,"
To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life,
And then to come out empty
it is a tragic error. (116)
trans by Robert Thurman
Huston Smith
#85. Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.
Christopher Hitchens
#86. It is better to risk starving to death than giving up on your dream. If you have given up on your dream, what's left?
Manoj Arora
#87. Bloody hell, grandsire," were Bones's first words as he approached. "You've left behind a wreckage of burned bodies, dead vampires, missing persons, threatened Guardians, and video evidence of our race's existence. Then you go on holiday. You really do have a death wish
Jeaniene Frost
#88. You're just a small piece. Death doesn't matter. The whole lives on.
Ramez Naam
#89. The work of redemption was accomplished by Christ in His death on the cross and has in view the payment of the price demanded by a holy God for the deliverance of the believer from the bondage and burden of sin. Inredemption the sinner is set free from his condemnation and slavery to sin.
John F. Walvoord
#90. Morrie," Koppel said, "that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?"
"You bet," Morrie whispered.
Mitch Albom
#91. Death can sneak up on you like a silent kitten, surprising you with its touch and you have a right to act surprised. Other times death stomps in the front door, unwanted and unannounced, and makes its noisy way to your seat on the sofa.
Hugh Elliot
#92. When I look back on my life all I see is the pain I experienced through it all; how I wished for death to come take me and relieve me from all the hurt inside.
Natalie De Clare
#93. Death is never more than a breath away from the act of playing music. Each note on a guitar represents a small curve: birth, life, and death-and then you start over.
Andy Summers
#94. [Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner belonged to] that small army of brave people who made it their duty, without thought of themselves or hope or expectation of reward, to strive for unpopular causes.
[Chapman Cohen on the death of noted freethinker and peace advocate Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner]
Chapman Cohen
#95. There is nothing to fear on earth but sin. Prison and death are nothing compared to a guilty conscience. If we are destined to suffer unjustly, if all the world forsake us, God will not. Whatever happens, then, let us put our trust in God.
Christoph Von Schmid
#96. Sure, things die. Yet hard on the heels of every death there comes a birth. And if the life around me is being perpetually refreshed in such a relentless manner, why would I think that the life within me can't have the same experience.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#97. I also knew that I was number one on the Yankees Cap hit parade. That settled me down. There's nothing like immident death to sharpen a guy's outlook.
Jim Stewart
#98. Whoever said ignorance is bliss must have died a horrible death with a really surprised look on his face.
Lisa Shearin
#99. His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.
- ,
Anais Nin
#100. When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.
H.L. Mencken
