DEATH QUOTES XXIV

quotations about death

What is Death? Death is the ending of life. When people die, their bodies stop working. The heart stops beating and the brain stops functioning. People have always wanted to learn the secret of living forever. In ancient times, explorers and scientists searched for the secret of eternal life. The truth is, nothing can live forever. Everyone and everything will die in time. Plants, animals, and people all die. Death is a natural part of life.

JOANNE MATTERN

Death


When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment.

MASAO ABE

A Study of Dogen: His Philosophy and Religion


This flesh and the other will be consumed,
the flower will doubtless perish without residue,
when death--sterile dawn, desiccated dust--
comes one day into the girdle of the haughty island,
and you, statue, daughter of man, will remain
gazing with the empty eyes that rose
up through one and another hand of the absent immortals.

PABLO NERUDA

"The Builders of Statues"


My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.

JOHN KEATS

"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"


Oh the grave!--the grave!--It buries every error--covers every defect--extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb, that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering before him!

WASHINGTON IRVING

"Rural Funerals", The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon


When do the dead die? When they are forgotten.

LAURA ESQUIVEL

The Law of Love


If a man should wanton walk with crime ... he shall find in death no great deliverance.

AESCHYLUS

The Eumenides


Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

The Book of Hours


There is no single best kind of death. A good death is one that is "appropriate" for that person. It is a death in which the hand of the way of dying slips easily into the glove of the act itself. It is in character, ego-syntonic. It, the death, fits the person. It is a death that one might choose if it were realistically possible for one to choose one's own death.

EDWIN SHNEIDMAN

A Commonsense Book of Death


Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

CHARLES FROHMAN

his last words before going down on the Lusitania


People walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before, and the crowd is not diminished. While we were living, the world seemed in a manner to exist only for us, for our delight and amusement, because it contributed to them. But our hearts cease to beat, and it goes on as usual, and thinks no more about us than it did in our lifetime.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners


The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

MARCUS AURELIUS

Meditations


Death is just--to the just.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


Life is a waste of woes,
And Death a river deep,
That ever onward flows,
Troubled, yet asleep.

WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE

"Lines To --", Imogen and Other Poems


Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free--men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.

ARTHUR KOESTLER

Dialogue with Death


He steps upon death that stirs a foot.

THOMAS DEKKER

Blurt


Remember the coffin where men
All must to dust be returning.

HENRI CAZALIS

"Always"


Life was to these a dream fulfilled,
And death a starry night.

HERMAN MELVILLE

"Chattanooga"


Now death is death! and yet is not one death
Another death? Stabbing is not the same
As shooting! Would you say a strangled man
Was drown'd? The end is one, the means are many,
And there the difference lies!

SHERIDAN KNOWLES

True Unto Death


Birds of Hell awaiting
With the wings on fire
Insane old Phoenix, baby
It's your death desire
The birds of Hell awaiting
With the wings on fire

MARILYN MANSON

"Birds of Hell Awaiting", The Pale Emperor