Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about life and death

656 quotes from 337 people

Most readBy personPage 29 of 44

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
Jack Kerouac1922–1969On the Road (1957), Part Two, Ch. 8
- Change
Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been.
G. K. Chesterton1874–1936Poems (1917), The Great Minimum
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson1809–1892“Tithonus”, st. 1 (1860)
I weep for Adonais — he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822Adonais (1821), St. I
No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Notes on the Next War (1935)
- War & Peace
The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.
Che Guevara1928–1967On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)
- Money
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that, sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.
Jorge Luis Borges1899–1986“Funes the Memorious” [“Funes El Memorioso”] (1944)
All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
ECEmil Cioran1911–1995The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
- Philosophy
I think… I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.
Neil Gaimanborn 1960Fragile Things (2006), Introduction, p. xiii
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
Virginia Woolf1882–1941Jacob’s Room (1922), Ch. 8
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
Thomas Mann1875–1955The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 2, “At Tienappels’,” (1924), trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter (1928).
If we can’t live in peace, then let’s die in peace.
Jim Jones1931–1978“Death Tape” FBI No. Q042 (November 18, 1978)
I have existed from all eternity and, behold, I am here; and I shall exist till the end of time, for my being has no end.
Kahlil Gibran1883–1931“Song of Man”, A Tear and a Smile (1914); tr. Juan Cole in The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994)
- Time
We cannot evade life’s course, but we can school ourselves to be superior to fortune and also to look unflinchingly upon the most painful things.
Hermann Hesse1877–1962Gertrude (1910), p. 236
- Courage
It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.
Robert A. Heinlein1907–1988Time Enough for Love (1973)
- Courage