Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about life and death

656 quotes from 337 people

Most readBy personPage 14 of 44

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.
Alexandre Dumas1802–1870The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Volume Five, Chapter 117In context
- Happiness
Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen; sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin.
Alexandre Dumas1802–1870The Three Musketeers (1844), Chapter XLVIIIIn context
- Philosophy
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
Henry van Dyke1852–1933
He not busy being born is busy dying.
Bob Dylanborn 1941Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
I witnessed the gruesome workings of the machinery of death; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork. It was the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all times.
Adolf Eichmann1906–1962CBC report (2000)
The man who regards life as meaningless is not merely unfortunate, but almost disqualified for life.
Albert Einstein1879–1955The World As I See It (1949)
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
Albert Einstein1879–1955Letter to his son Eduard (5 February 1930), as quoted in Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), p. 367
What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion.
Albert Einstein1879–1955The World As I See It (1949)
- Religion
Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein1879–1955“Why Socialism?”, Monthly Review (May 1949)
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Eliot1819–1880Middlemarch (1871)In context
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965The Hollow Men (1925), Last linesIn context
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin
T. S. Eliot1888–1965Poems (1920), “Whispers of Immortality”
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
T. S. Eliot1888–1965The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)In context
- Time
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965The Waste Land (1922), IIn context
Life is a festival only to the wise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882
- Wisdom