quotations about death
Those who think about death, carrying with them their existing ideas and emotions, usually assume that they will have, during their last hours, ideas and emotions of like vividness ... but they do not fully recognize the implication that the feeling faculty, too, is almost gone. The imagine the state to be one in which they can have emotions such as they now have on contemplating the cessation of life. But at the last all the mental powers simultaneously ebb, as do the bodily powers, and with them goes the capacity for emotion in general. It is, indeed, possible that in its last stages consciousness is occupied by a not displeasurable sense of rest.
HERBERT SPENCER
Facts and Comments
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
HORACE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Smiley's People
The gate of death is never at rest.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Death makes equal the high and low.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Be Merry Friends
Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist the only difference between a living and a dead body is, that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must be death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as death where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
Isis Unveiled
Death's gang is bigger and tougher than anyone else's. Always has been and always will be. Death's the man.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape.
DAVID GERROLD
The Man Who Folded Himself
Fair Death, kind Death, it was a gracious deed
To take that weary vagrant to thy breast.
Love, Song and Wine had he, and but one need--Rest.
JOYCE KILMER
"A Dead Poet"
Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Field of Philosophy
We're ever making plans for life,
But seldom plans for death,
Though death we know must come to us,
And life is but a breath.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
Death is the fate no one can escape. The question, then, is, How does one die? A person can die like a hero or like a coward. The difference is that the hero can face death without fear, whereas the coward can't.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Fear of Life
Of all the Gods, Death only craves not gifts:
Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured
Avails; no altars hath he, nor is soothed
By hymns of praise. From him alone of all
The powers of Heaven Persuasion holds aloof.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
Taunting Death ... means pitting oneself against a wily enemy who cannot lose.
J. K. ROWLING
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
Death is when the monsters get you.
STEPHEN KING
Salem's Lot
The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren’t for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family’s turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.
ADAM RAPP
Under the Wolf
Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic