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Quotes about life and death

656 quotes from 337 people

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Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.
Colette1873–1954Le Pur et l’Impur (The Pure and the Impure) (1932)
Cease, Man, to mourn, to weep, to wail; enjoy thy shining hour of sun;
We dance along Death’s icy brink, but is the dance less full of fun?
Richard Francis Burton1821–1890The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
Simone de Beauvoir1908–1986The Coming of Age (1970), Pt. 2, Ch. 2: Time, activity, history, p. 412
I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!
Anne Frank1929–1945The Diary of a Young Girl (1942—1944), 5 April 1944
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
J. M. Barrie1860–1937The Little Minister (1891), Ch. 1: The Love-Light
If I can any way contribute to the diversion or improvement of the country in which I live, I shall leave it, when I am summoned out of it, with the secret satisfaction of thinking that I have not lived in vain.
Joseph Addison1672–1719The Spectator (1711–1714), No. 1 (1 March 1711)
Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.
Albert Schweitzer1875–1965The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 164
Human life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we won’t do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death.
Emmeline Pankhurst1858–1928Freedom or Death (1913)
- Freedom
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Steve Jobs1955–2011Address at Stanford University (2005)
- Decisions
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
H. P. Lovecraft1890–1937“The Nameless City”, The Wolverine (November 1921); quoted again in “The Call of Cthulhu” (written 1926, Weird Tales 1928)
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
Albert Camus1913–1960Review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, published in the newspaper Alger Républicain (20 October 1938), p. 5
- Philosophy
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die.
Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
The bitter, yet merciful, lesson which death teaches us is to distinguish the gold from the tinsel, the true values from the worthless chaff.
Felix Adler1851–1933Life and Destiny (1913)
I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!⁠—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning1806–1861How Do I Love Thee? (1850), Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), No. XLIIIIn context
- Love
Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
Charles Lindbergh1902–1974“Is Civilization Progress?” in Reader’s Digest (July 1964)