While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. ~ Leonardo da Vinci
I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach. ~ Mary Roach
I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death. ~ Leonardo da Vinci
Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. ~ Socrates
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. ~ J.K. Rowling
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. ~ Mark Twain
It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things. ~ Lemony Snicket
For two hours I sat there, thinking of bygone times; recalling old scenes, and summoning half-forgotten faces out of the mists of the past; listening, in fancy, to voices that long ago grew silent for all time, and to once familiar songs that nobody sings now. ~ Mark Twain
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. ~ Mark Twain
I go to seek a Great Perhaps. ~ François Rabelais
If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone? ~ Jodi Picoult
DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH. ~ Terry Pratchett
If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up? ~ Chuck Palahniuk
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. ~ David Eagleman
Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see. ~ Helen Keller
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. ~ Isaac Asimov
If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. ~ Will Rogers
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory. ~ Antonio Porchia
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? ~ Richard Dawkins
Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five. ~ Benjamin Franklin
The meaning of life is that it stops. ~ Franz Kafka
To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. ~ Thomas Campbell
Why is it that men, who are afraid of death, call those who commit suicide “cowards”? ~ C.J. Cala
Tears are the silent language of grief. ~ Voltaire
There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief. ~ Aeschylus
The word ‘happiness’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. ~ Carl Gustav Jung
The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch. ~ Yehuda HaLevi
Grief does not change you, it reveals you. ~ John Green
If Love could have saved you, you would have lived forever. ~ Unknown
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. ~ Hawthorne
There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy. ~ Dante Alighieri
Life asked death, 'Why do people love me but hate you?' Death responded, 'Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.'
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken? ~ Terry Pratchett
Death leaves a heartache difficult to heal;
Love leaves sweet memories no one can steal.
Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart. ~ John Adams
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
I'm not afraid of death because I don't believe in it. It's just getting out of one car, and into another. ~ John Lennon
Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them. ~ Margaret Mitchell
"This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment, yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. I looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog."
(Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death.)
Don’t cry because it’s over, Smile because it happened. ~ Dr. Seuss
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. ~ Horace Mann
The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes. ~ Courtney Love
The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you’re faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking. ~ James Patterson
To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness. ~ Erich Fromm
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death. ~ Milan Kundera
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity. ~ Edvard Munch
Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat. ~ José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death. ~ Samuel Butler
Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don't have to live forever. You just have to live. ~ Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
Neither the sun, nor death can be looked at steadily. ~ François de La Rochefoucauld
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ~ Charles Bukowski
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ~H.P. Lovecraft
Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –
See also The Mysteries of Death - 250 Books on DVDrom and The Number 13 & Other Superstitions - 100 Books on DVDROM
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