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Quotes about life and death

656 quotes from 337 people

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Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome.
Carl Jung1875–1961Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)
Nothing reopens the springs of love so fully as absence, and no absence so thoroughly as that which must needs be endless.
Anthony Trollope1815–1882The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), Vol. II, ch. 67
- Love
Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.
Marcus Aurelius121–180Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Meditations. iv. 17.
- Virtue
I’ll say one thing about an oil boom; it will teach a kid that Life’s a pretty rotten thing as quick as anything I can think of.
Robert E. Howard1906–1936From a letter to Farnsworth Wright (c. Summer 1931)
- Youth
It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.
Stefan Zweig1881–1942Beware of Pity (1939)
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 Poe1809–1849“The Premature Burial” (1844).
Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. This is what life has taught me.
Katherine Mansfield1888–1923Journal entry (29 January 1922), published in The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927)
A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.
Boris Yeltsin1931–2007Statement to a Times reporter in 1990, as quoted in “The wit and wisdom of Boris” in Guardian Unlimited (23 April 2007)
We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or dies. But will we be that generation?
Bonoborn 1960Foreword to The End of Poverty (2005) by Jeffrey Sachs
- Children
What of the souls already released from their bodies? We believe that they are overwhelmed in that vast sea of eternal light and of luminous eternity.
Bernard of Clairvaux1090–1153On Loving God, Ch. 11, Paul Halsall trans.
This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to Die, yet their Friendship and Society are, in the best Sense, ever present, because Immortal.
William Penn1644–1718More Fruits of Solitude (1702), nos. 127–134
- Friendship
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
MOMary Oliver1935–2019House of Light (1990), “The Ponds”
- Inspiration
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
James Joyce1882–1941Dubliners (1914), “The Dead”In context
- Age
I do nobody harm, I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith, I long not to live.
Thomas More1478–1535Thomas More’s Account, in a letter to his daughter Margaret Roper, of his Second Interrogation
As in a game ov cards, so in the game ov life, we must play what is dealt tew us, and the glory consists, not so mutch in winning, as in playing a poor hand well.
Josh Billings1818–1885Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868), Ch. XXIV, “Perkussion Caps”, p. 89