Notable Books

73+ Quotes on Death and Mortality

Leonardo da Vinci Quote: As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.
Leonardo da Vinci
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Mark Twain
No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.
Euripides
Although the constant shadow of certain death looms everyday, the pleasures and joys of life can be so fine and affecting that the heart is nearly stilled in astonishment.
Dean Koontz
Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure.
Mortimer Collins
Horace Quote: Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man’s cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man’s cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
Horace
Death is a release from the impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and the hard service of the flesh.
Marcus Aurelius
As men we are all equal in the presence of death.
Publilius Syrus
We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.
Madame de Stael
Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.
John Donne
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.  It is as though they were traveling abroad.
Marcel Proust
Ernest Hemingway Quote: Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
Ernest Hemingway
Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.
Herodotus
Years, following years, steal something every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.
Horace
Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.
Marcus Aurelius
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
Henry Van Dyke
There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it.
Robert Bulwer-Lytton
Francis Bacon Quote: Men fear death as children to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.
Men fear death as children to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.
Francis Bacon
When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. 
H. L. Mencken
The goal of all life is death.
Sigmund Freud
I'm not afraid of dying. To me dying is like getting out of one car and into another
John Lennon
Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.
Abraham Lincoln
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Quote: Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.
Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
W. Somerset Maugham
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
Khalil Gibran
Forget not death, O man! For you may be certain of one thing, he forgets not thee.
Persian Proverb
Death is softer by far than tyranny.
Aeschylus
You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.
Robert Alton Harris (Reference to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey)
No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well.
Plato
Death tugs at my ear and says: “Live, I am coming.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death.
Harvey Cushing
God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality.
Jacques Rigaut
Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
Socrates
Carl Jung Quote: To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.
To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.
Carl Jung
The resounding echo of the mortal coil, echoes in the ears of those who are unprepared for it. To some, it sounds like a symphony – to other, a death toll.
George Whelton
Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.
Albert Einstein
Do not fear death so much but rather the inadequate life.
Bertolt Brecht
Death is a friend of ours and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
Francis Bacon
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
Thomas Browne
O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray,
To come to me: of cureless ills thou art
The one physician. Pain lays not its touch
Upon a corpse.
Aeschylus
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch
Jut as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life.
Seneca
Schopenhauer Quote: After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Life is but a moment, death also is but another.
Robert H. Schuller
Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows.
Pope Paul VI
Don't strew me with roses after I'm dead.
When Death claims the light of my brow,
No flowers of life will cheer me: instead
You may give me my roses now!
Thomas F. Healey
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
Sylvia Plath
Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.
T. S. Eliot
That which is so universal as death must be a benefit.
Friedrich Schiller
Emily Dickinson Quote: Death is a Dialogue between.. the Spirit and the Dust.
Death is a Dialogue between.. the Spirit and the Dust.
Emily Dickinson
There is a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat some time or other.
Miguel de Cervantes
He who doesn't fear death dies only once.
Giovanni Falcone
We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.
David Sarnoff
You can evade life, but you can not evade Death.
T. S. Eliot
It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up - that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go.
Jean De La Fontaine
I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
Jean Giraudoux
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
Marcus Aurelius
Epicurus Quote: Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.
Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.
Epicurus
Death is a debt we all must pay.
Euripides
Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream.
Ryokan
Some things are so completely ludicrous that a man must laugh or die. To die laughing must be the most glorious of all deaths.
Edgar Allan Poe
Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.
Charles Caleb Colton
Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.
Lao Tzu
Death always brings with it a kind of stupefaction, so difficult is it for the human mind to realize and resign itself to the blank and utter nothingness.
Gustave Flaubert
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near.
Andrew Marvell
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
Marcel Proust
It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.
Epicurus
Death is a black camel which kneels at every man's gate.
Arabian Proverb
A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
Stewart Alsop
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
John Muir
If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
Charles Sanders Pierce
Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we’d find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were to much of it.
Ray Kurzweil
We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret.
We took our risk with you; you died and we live. We take your noble gift, salute for the last time those lines of pitiable crosses, those solitary mounds, those unknown graves, and turn to live our lives out as we may.
Which of us were fortunate--who can tell? For you there is silence and cold twilight drooping in awful desolation over those motionless lands. For us sunlight and the sound of women's voices, song and hope and laughter, despair, gaiety, love-life.
Lost terrible silent comrades, we, who might have died, salute you.
Richard Aldington

A Seeker's Thoughts on Death

What could the undying possible be?

Could it be what you essentially are?

Then I'm obviously not talking about the physical body, but of something much more original and yet subtle than the gross body.

Find out :)

On Fear and Pain

The immediacy of fear and pain compels one to be present in the moment, one cannot so easily be distracted by everyday thoughts that one typically walks around with when something pressing seizes your attention.

Understood from a deeper perspective, the reason why fear and pain compels the subjective experience to direct experience is mainly because the felt imminence of death.

From a philosophical and/or spiritual standpoint, death is a powerful idea to contemplate. Death means the end of the physical organism and perhaps also the psychological sense of I. I say perhaps because I can certainly see the possibility of an “ecology of souls” before and after a sentient physical being dies. Most people aren’t completely unfamiliar with this concept, though it may have been expressed in different ways, such as reincarnation or the transmigration of souls.

Nonetheless the felt imminence of death has a peculiar tendency of making us appreciate each moment more carefully and thoroughly. Perhaps it is precisely because of this refocusing into direct experience, where death becomes so powerful in making us humble and grateful.

(excerpt from Immersed: 12 Paths to Direct Experience)


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