Quotes About The Reality Of Death

#1. Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death.

John Thorn

#2. I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.

Meghan O'Rourke

#3. For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind's lack of pity, mankind's fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare.

Mary Webb

#4. Contemplating from the confines of a desk the reality of death is worthwhile, but only moderately enriching. Too often do I resort to it; rarely do I get with death in the ring.

Richard Ronald Allan

#5. [We assume] that the self is an actual living thing, but it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death.

Thandie Newton

#6. Although we may trust God's promises for life after death and the certainty of a heavenly home, we must still face the reality of death.

Billy Graham

#7. Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.

Joan Didion

#8. Believe in the wonderment of life, the magic of love, and the reality of death.

Carroll Bryant

#9. Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#10. Despite the fact that life has repeatedly reinforced my conviction that the tomb was empty, some of my most profound errors have occurred when I was straining under the weight of a death that was in reality the liberation of a transition.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#11. Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality, And dreams in their development have breath, And tears and tortures, and the touch of joy.

George Gordon Byron

#12. She is the harbinger of nightmares as well as death, destruction, and insanity. Said to reign in an alternate dimension, a bleak and desertlike twilight version of reality, Lilith has long been hailed as the queen of mental darkness.

Kelly Creagh

#13. Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, that's what the Statue of Bigotry says. Your poor huddled masses, let's just club them to death, and get it over with.

Lou Reed

#14. The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.

Thomas Wolfe

#15. To ignore death and to be afraid of it is dumb because everyone is going to face it at some point. If you look at death and the reality of it, you realize that we're all going to die, so let's use this time on Earth to be positive and do good things.

Ray Toro

#16. Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death.

Heraclitus

#17. Our true reality is not a limited phenomenon, existing only between birth and death. It is eternal life that exists alone, self-existent and self-sufficient, the essence of all that is, was, and ever will be throughout the universe. That is what you really are.

Ilchi Lee

#18. The erruption of feelings & emotions that follows a near-death exerience, or any event that causes us to stop & look deeply at the reality of our lives, is ripe with the potential for insight & clarity.

Allan Lokos

#19. The Orgasmic Death Gimmick is rather complicated. It could be called the whole birth-death cycle of action, persuading people that birth and death are realities.

William S. Burroughs

#20. Only those who live in the wilderness can recognize the central truth of existence, which is that death lives right beside us at all times, as close and as relevant as life itself, and that this reality is nothing to fear but is a sacred truth to be praised.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#21. The life which, if i were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degredation. It's a negative reality, just like death
a sort of heaven without the pain and terror of dying.

Henry Miller

#22. Since the election, since the formation of a government, the death in Iraq has increased. The United States stands by, helpless to do anything about it. That's the reality, not George Bush's revisionist history!

Mark Shields

#23. He actually believes that she was murdered. The reality is, of course, also, that his car, his driver, were involved in this crash therefore there will be people that believe that he is ultimately responsible not only for the death of his own son, but for the death of the princess.

Robert Jobson

#24. I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity.

Douglas Coupland

#25. Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence.
What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.

Joseph Conrad

#26. Potemkin suffered bitterly from having nothing left to want. For when dreams turn into reality, there is an empty spot where the dreams used to be, and Potemkin had no dreams left.

Eleanor Herman

#27. In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death ... these are things that unite us all.

Albert Camus

#28. The world, as it is, is not a permanent reality, but is a temporary product of our choices as creators.

Bryant McGill

#29. The very possibility of death focuses the mind wonderfully.

Jasper Fforde

#30. Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.

Henry Miller

#31. If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn't worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it's life or death.

Morgan Freeman

#32. The Cross of Christ is to be a reality to me not only once for all at my conversion, but all through my life as a Christian. True spirituality does not stop at the negative (death), but without the negative - in comprehension and in practice - we are not ready to go on.

Francis A. Schaeffer

#33. The reality of his predicament hit him hard. There's no way out of this now, save arrest or death. Professor Ratib had made it sound so academic, but it wasn't. Regardless of whether we're attacking human- or infrastructure-related targets, it's terrorism. If Husam thinks that I'm a risk, I'm dead.

Christian F. Burton

#34. He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.

Umberto Eco

#35. TV networks are dying. The death throes of religion give us jihads. The death throes of television give us reality shows.

Penn Jillette

#36. When we die our money, fame, and honors will be meaningless. We own nothing in this world. Everything we think we own is in reality only being loaned to us until we die. And on our deathbed at the moment of death, no one but God can save our souls.

Michael Huffington

#37. Expose yourself to aloneness. When a person is left alone, he starts thinking of higher reality - about death, life, soul, God and the mystery of all.

Chinmayananda Saraswati

#38. Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means ... airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash.

Cecil Beaton

#39. There was need of a phantastic, indestructible optimism, and one far removed from all sense of reality, in order, for example, to discover in the shameful death of Christ really the highest salvation and the redemption of the world.

Carl Jung

#40. I am firmly convinced that there is life after death, not in a primitive sense but as the entry of my completely finite person into God's infinity, as a transition into another reality beyond the dimension of space and time that pure reason can neither affirm nor deny.

Hans Kung

#41. It is a symbol evoking a reality that touches the depths of the person ... the light of goodness that vanquishes evil, of love that overcomes hatred, of life that defeats death.

Pope Benedict XVI

#42. There's and entire world outside these bleak pages, one full of SUNRISES and KITTY-CATS and late-night BURRITO RUNS and the horrible, creaking amble of us all towards DEATH. It is to that world that I am afraid I must release you to now.

David Malki

#43. If we let go of things, our life is going to change.
And the reality is that we are actually more afraid of change than we are of death.

Caroline Myss

#44. People will treat with disdain such phenomena as are proved by the evidence of the senses, and commonly experienced - while they will defend to the death the reality of a phenomenon which they have neither seen nor experienced.

Diana Gabaldon

#45. So how does God affect justice in this life/economy/reality? A lightening bolt, an angel of death, or by the hand of a human being?"

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#46. The sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of it into the twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period of our incarceration; at death we step out of the prison again into the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality.

Annie Besant

#47. That night, he laid in his bed thinking about all the possibilities. They came like waves in his mind. At first they came slow, then gradually built up speed, cresting into full on dreams, until finally, they broke onto the shore with all of their reality. First dreams, then nightmares.

Brian Joyce

#48. He gets away with it because he's strong.'
'This is the story of mankind.'
'I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.'
'Yes. But then I read the newspaper.

Christopher Buehlman

#49. The coma carried me into a world where time and space seemed to vanish; it was a dreamlike existence in which people, places, and situations shifted as quickly as thoughts. I had a profound sense of being at a crossroads, a turning point, somewhere between death and life ...

Hal Zina Bennett

#50. This world can seem marvellously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place. What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?

Sogyal Rinpoche

#51. [ ... ] I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death.

Russell Banks

#52. We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

Henry Giroux

#53. I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.

Katherine Paterson

#54. All of us have to deal with death at one time or another, but to have in one's heart a solid conviction concerning the reality of eternal life is to bring a sense of peace in an hour of tragedy that can come from no other source under the heavens

Gordon B. Hinckley

#55. The erruption of feelings & emotions that follows a near-death exerience, or any event that causes us to stop & look deeply at the reality of our lives, is ripe with the potential for insight & clarity.

Allan Lokos

#56. Fiction is just a mirror of reality for the most part. Many things that happen in fiction don't even happen here. But as far as pain and sadness. Joy and love, life and death, it's all real here. Here it's real.

Lucian Bane

#57. We live in a bubble of the fantasy of death, but the reality of it is something that we obviously all face and have to deal with, at some point.

Michael Sheen

#58. [after the death of a loved one] It is when there is nothing more to be done that the reality of the loss often hits with full force.

Judith Martin

#59. It's not that easy living with malaria. The reality of the high annual death toll should make that very obvious.

T.K. Naliaka

#60. I think it's very dangerous, the idea of celebrity - you have to be constantly controversial to maintain the status of celebrity. Reality TV is the death of entertainment - it's just mindless TV but popular because of its voyeuristic nature, and people are very voyeuristic.

David Suchet

#61. In the middle of the brutal reality of death, Jesus never stopped calling people to life. Centering his attention on life, he continually pushes past the smaller and cheaper things we tend to live for and goes right to the core issue, which is life itself.

Rick McKinley

#62. As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy.

Stefan Zweig

#63. The only thing set in stone are dumb quotes and names of dead people. Everything else is subject to change.

Kimberly Spencer

#64. The world isn't big enough for all of us.

S.R. Crawford

#65. Was it better to die in the illusion of sunshine and warmth or face death in a cold darkness of reality? Was it better to die in happy ignorance or terrified knowledge? The answer, if you're a Londoner, is that it's better not to die at all.

Ben Aaronovitch

#66. Science is great for us. But for someone who see the human evaluation for more than one million years, science is a just a one instant and younger than a baby.

Muditha Champika

#67. fear can only be created by an enclosed mind happiness and laughter are all measures of are success when the reality are goals are all the same death

so the reality of success can be seen as a disguise to protect from the fear which is death

Richard Kent

#68. And there's this talk that we're asking soldiers to make the greatest sacrifice, but the reality is that civilians bear the burden of war more than the combatants. You're much more likely to get accidentally blown up or killed by a death squad than you are to die in a firefight.

Michael Hastings

#69. The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped.

Stanislav Grof

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

Thomas Browne

#71. Some right-wingers, especially those who think of the entire Islamic religion as a totalitarian death cult, would likewise get a crash-course in reality if they ever bothered to hang out in Iraq and meet actual Muslims.

Michael Totten

#72. The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

Ravi Zacharias

#73. Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change.

Isabel Allende

#74. Heaven's full of astronauts and the Lord's on death row.

Joni Mitchell

#75. A soul isn't given for free. The races of men fight each other to the death for the honor of being recognized as human beings, with souls.

Daniel H. Wilson

#76. Death and sex are the dominant reality of our day.

Nick Mancuso

#77. How many wives have been forced by the death of well-intentioned but too protective husbands to face reality late in life, bewildered and frightened because they were strangers to it!

Hortense Odlum

#78. Knowledge of material reality is the knowledge of death.

Richard M. Weaver

#79. This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#80. When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#81. If I can imagine the death of reality then I can imagine a whole new world of possibilities

Rita Ames

#82. Because in the end, we die. It's like Chekhov observed in so many of his plays: 'in two hundred years, no one will even know we were here.

Zack Love

#83. Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

Eugene Ionesco

#84. Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

Salman Rushdie

#85. I was deeply impressed by the fact that my life could lose three days without my having any awareness of it. Maybe this was a preview of death: continuous visions and dreams and vague glimpses of reality. Only with death you never wake up: you keep having the weird images forever.

John Marsden

#86. ...and when we die
we die alone
I cry, I cry alone
Like a piece of stone
I am thrown
into the wavy ocean of life
to atone...to atone
Only to atone...

Munia Khan

#87. Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

Don DeLillo

#88. I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.

Haruki Murakami

#89. Treasures are hidden and hard to find but if we could find a real treasure, it will shine our lives. In the similar way ultimate reality is hidden and hard to find but if we could find it, it will shine our lives.

Muditha Champika

#90. There were so many layers of reality to the world. Nothing stopped for death; nothing stopped for grief or horror or tragedy.

Rachel Caine

#91. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking.

Angela Carter

#92. In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

P.D. James

#93. When your head is smashing into the concrete you don't have question about whether it's a real sensation. And ultimately, that's what's going to unmake us all - smashing up against the physical reality of death and decay, and being unmade.

Will Sheff

#94. In Valiente's world," Eden wrote,"Love is never consummated, but remains a figment of the hero's own imagination. In preferring dreams to reality, the hero dooms himself. He would rather risk a physical death than the death of his beloved illusion.

Ava Zavora

#95. The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.

Margaret Atwood

#96. Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual's reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it.

Tony Hillerman

#97. The intense roller coaster of emotions will gradually lesson over time. But there is no timeframe for the grieving process, and it will not be rushed, no matter how fast you'd like to "get over it." The reality is that there is no getting over it; you can only walk through it.

Elizabeth Berrien

#98. Behind everyday reality, there is a deeper reality so cruel that it condemns to death those who crime is no greater than the pursuit of their own curiosity.
("Shem-El-Nessim: An Inspiration In Perfume")

Chris Bell

#99. Death is a reality that calls the rest of life and all of our assorted strivings into sharp relief.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#100. I believe that the world is dying, not just me. And fantasy will save no one. The deathly unreality of Utopia, the merchandizing of Utopia is wicked, deadly reality.

Harold Brodkey