~Madame de Stael~
We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.

~Mark Twain~
All say, “How hard it is that we have to die” – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

~Mark Twain~
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

~Marcel Proust~
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~
We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

~Maurice Maeterlinck~
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations~
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.

~Mortimer Collins~
Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure.

~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960~
The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive – perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.

~Norman Cousins~
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

~Percival Arland Ussher~
A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

~Plato~
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.

~Philip Dow~
Death is patiently making my mask as I sleep. Each morning I awake to discover in the corners of my eyes the small tears of his wax.

~Robert Fulghum~
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge — myth is more potent than history — dreams are more powerful than facts — hope always triumphs over experience — laughter is the cure for grief — love is stronger than death.

~René Francois Regnier~
Gaily I lived as ease and nature taught,
And spent my little life without a thought,
And am amazed that Death, that tyrant grim,
Should think of me, who never thought of him.

~R. Geis~
I wouldn’t mind dying – it’s the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me.

~Robert Alton Harris~
You can be a king or a street sweeper,
but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.

~Ryokan~
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.

~Doris Day~
The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you’ll grow out of it.

~Denis Leary~
Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty five years and you pay it back and then one day you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then one day you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

~David Sarnoff~
We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.

~Edvard Munch~
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

~Edward Young, Night Thoughts~
Our birth is nothing but our death begun.

~Emily Dickinson~
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality

~Emily Bronte~
Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity.

~Elbert Hubbard~
Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly.

~Ernest Becker~
The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

~Ernest Becker~
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.

~Erik H. Erikson~
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.

~Edwin Arnold~
For death,
Now I know, is that first breath
Which our souls draw when we enter
Life, which is of all life center

~Euripides~
No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.

~Euripides~
Death is a debt we all must pay.

~Francis Bacon, Essays~
Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

~Friedrich Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man~
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one’s own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses~ so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.

~From the television show Roseanne~
If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn’t going to be much fun.

~From the movie Gladiator~
I knew a man who once said, “death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back.”

~F. Forrester Church~
Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.

~Giovanni Falcone~
He who doesn’t fear death dies only once.

~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage~
Death, the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.

~Attributed to George Carlin~
Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.

~George Bernard Shaw~
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.

~George Eliot, The Choir Invisible~
Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again.~Henry Van Dyke~
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.