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Quotes about life and death

656 quotes from 337 people

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When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.
Stephenie Meyerborn 1973Twilight (2005), Preface, p. 1
I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?,” I now put the same question about anyone alive.
ECEmil Cioran1911–1995The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark — a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.
Robert Graves1895–1985“Sick Love,” lines 7–12, from Poems 1929
- Time
Thus man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.
Washington Irving1783–1859The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820), “Westminster Abbey”
- Fame
I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.
Willa Cather1873–1947My Ántonia (1918), My Antonia (1918), Book I, Ch. 2In context
- Happiness
The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.
ECEmil Cioran1911–1995The New Gods (1969)
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.
Huey P. Newton1942–1989Revolutionary Suicide (1973), p. 190
- Fear
There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.
Viktor Frankl1905–1997Man’s Search for Meaning (1946; 1959; 1984), p. 126 in the 1984 Pocket Books edition
Death begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a few hours of marching cause painful sores which become fatally infected.
Primo Levi1919–1987If This Is a Man (1947)
Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
ECEmil Cioran1911–1995The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.
Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849The Philosophy of Composition (1846), p.122 Line 17
- Poetry
Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.
Albert Schweitzer1875–1965Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2: Civilization and Ethics, Chapter 26
Were I still in death and you fighting for life, I would come back to the abyss to aid you⁠—aye, whether my spirit floated with the purple sails on the crystal sea of paradise, or writhed in the molten flames of hell!
Robert E. Howard1906–1936“Queen of the Black Coast” (1934)
- Love
Life is not easy for any of us, but what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted in something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.
Marie Curie1867–1934Letter to her brother Józef (18 March 1894), quoted in Eve Curie, Madame Curie (1937)
- Motivation & Goals
Men will not always die quietly.
John Maynard Keynes1883–1946The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter VI, p. 228