It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.
Mark Twain - Keyword(s): , Exaggeration

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
Voltaire - Keyword(s): Animals , Civilization

Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor.
Homer - Keyword(s): , Life

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
Isaac Asimov - Keyword(s): Life , Literature , Writing

The goal of all life is death.
Sigmund Freud - Keyword(s): , Life

To save a man's life against his will is the same as killing him.
Horace - Keyword(s): Life

Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
Francis Bacon - Keyword(s):

Let life be as beautiful as summer flowers and death as beautiful as autumn leaves.
Rabindranath Tagore - Keyword(s): , Life

A man afraid of death will never play the part of a live man.
Seneca - Keyword(s): , Fear

I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb.
Vaslav Nijinsky - Keyword(s): Animals , Food , Vegetarianism

We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.
Jean de La Bruyere - Keyword(s): Happiness , Laughter , Fear

There are but three events in a man's life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.
Jean de La Bruyere - Keyword(s): Carpe Diem , Birth , Life

Embalm, v.: To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew.
Ambrose Bierce - Keyword(s): , Nature , Life

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Mark Twain - Keyword(s): Carpe Diem

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
Mark Twain - Keyword(s):

To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.
C.G. Jung - Keyword(s): , Life

God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.
Anonymous - Keyword(s): , Life

Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly.
Elbert Hubbard - Keyword(s):

If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn't worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it's life or death.
Morgan Freeman - Keyword(s): Life , Challenge , Reality

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Anais Nin - Keyword(s): Life

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
Edna Ferber - Keyword(s): Life , Love , Writing

If I knew I should die tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.
Stephen Girard - Keyword(s): , Trees

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau - Keyword(s): Life

God made death so we'd know when to stop.
Steven Stiles - Keyword(s):

He who doesn't fear death dies only once.
Giovanni Falcone - Keyword(s):

Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.
Herodotus - Keyword(s):

Death is a debt we all must pay.
Euripides - Keyword(s):

Oh, may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again.
George Eliot - Keyword(s):

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Alice Walker - Keyword(s): , Life

Our birth is nothing but our death begun.
Edward Young - Keyword(s):

The idea is to die young as late as possible.
Ashley Montagu - Keyword(s): Age

Death is the surest calculation that can be made.
Ludwig Buchner - Keyword(s):

Years, following years, steal something every day; at last they steal us from ourselves away.
Horace - Keyword(s):

No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well.
Plato - Keyword(s):

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
Socrates - Keyword(s):

Pacifism is ultimately nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others die, at the pleasure of the world's thugs.
Sam Harris - Keyword(s): Pacifism , World

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.
Percival Arland Ussher - Keyword(s):

Death, the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
George Gordon - Keyword(s):

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident - It is as common as life.
Henry David Thoreau - Keyword(s):

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
Khalil Gibran - Keyword(s):

You're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable.
Tim O'Brien - Keyword(s): , Life

When you die, if you get a choice between going to regular heaven or pie heaven, choose pie heaven. It might be a trick, but if it's not, mmmmm boy!
Jack Handey - Keyword(s): , Desserts

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
Thomas Mann - Keyword(s):

Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
George Carlin - Keyword(s):

Violence in the voice is often only the death rattle of reason in the throat.
John Frederick Boyes - Keyword(s): Reason , Violence

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
Arthur Schopenhauer - Keyword(s): Life , Youth

After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
J.K. Rowling - Keyword(s):

Well, right now... I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like... I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading....
Tim O'Brien - Keyword(s):

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
Steven Wright - Keyword(s):

If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn't going to be much fun.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
Irish Saying - Keyword(s): , Grief , Love

And they die an equal death - the idler and the man of mighty deeds.
Homer - Keyword(s):

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton - Keyword(s): Music , Soul

Let us all be brave enough to die the death of a martyr, but let no one lust for martyrdom.
Mahatma Gandhi - Keyword(s): Courage , Lust

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
Tennessee Williams - Keyword(s):

People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anais Nin - Keyword(s):

For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.
William Penn - Keyword(s):

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
Stewart Alsop - Keyword(s):

When you're dead, you're dead. And until then, there's ice cream.
Anonymous - Keyword(s): , Desserts

I knew a man who once said, "death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back."
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality.
Jacques Rigaut - Keyword(s):

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.
Marcel Proust - Keyword(s):

The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.
Mignon McLaughlin - Keyword(s):

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery - Keyword(s):

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko - Keyword(s):

No one ever really dies as long as they took the time to leave us with fond memories.
Chris Sorensen - Keyword(s): , Grief , Memory

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Samuel Butler - Keyword(s):

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch - Keyword(s):

I want a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant clergyman. I want to hedge my bets.
Wilson Mizner - Keyword(s):

Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow, serenaded by a stray bird or two. Kings and commoners end up the same, no more enduring than last night's dream.
Ryokan - Keyword(s):

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
Jean Giraudoux - Keyword(s):

Death is a distant rumor to the young.
Andrew A. Rooney - Keyword(s):

God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath.
John Donne - Keyword(s):

Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
George Bernard Shaw - Keyword(s):

Death is patiently making my mask as I sleep. Each morning I awake to discover in the corners of my eyes the small tears of his wax.
Philip Dow - Keyword(s):

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.
Leonardo da Vinci - Keyword(s):

Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
Henry Van Dyke - Keyword(s):

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.
Seneca - Keyword(s):

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.
Albert Einstein - Keyword(s):

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go.
Jean de La Fontaine - Keyword(s):

There's nothing certain in a man's life except this: That he must lose it.
Aeschylus - Keyword(s):

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
Arthur Schopenhauer - Keyword(s):

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein - Keyword(s):

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
Norman Cousins - Keyword(s):

To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Keyword(s):

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.
Doris Day - Keyword(s):

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz - Keyword(s):

Most of our diversions do not so much delay death as accustom us to it.
Mignon McLaughlin - Keyword(s):

Death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits.
John Webster - Keyword(s):

Death is a release from the impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and the hard service of the flesh.
Marcus Aurelius - Keyword(s):

On a large enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

I wouldn't mind dying - it's the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me.
R. Geis - Keyword(s):

Anyhow, it's not so bad.... I mean, when you're dead, you just have to be yourself.
Tim O'Brien - Keyword(s):

Studies find top 3 most stressful moments in people's lives: death, divorce, and properly pronouncing "Worcestershire sauce."
Tony Hsieh - Keyword(s): , Stress

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather - Keyword(s):

There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death.
Kenneth Patchen - Keyword(s):

Death does not wait to see if things are done or not done.
Kularnava - Keyword(s):

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
Marcel Proust - Keyword(s):

You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.
The Epic of Gilgamesh - Keyword(s):

There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death.
Harvey Cushing - Keyword(s):

You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.
Robert Alton Harris - Keyword(s):

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.
Euripides - Keyword(s):

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
Erik H. Erikson - Keyword(s):

We never bury the dead, son. We take them with us. It's the price of living.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Keyword(s):

Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees.
J.J. Furnas - Keyword(s):

Death is life's way of telling you you're fired.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
Maurice Maeterlinck - Keyword(s): , Knowledge

If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

Suicide is man's way of telling God, "You can't fire me - I quit."
Bill Maher - Keyword(s):

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
Leonardo da Vinci - Keyword(s):

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.
Madame de Stael - Keyword(s):

When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
Henry Louis Mencken - Keyword(s):

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
Thomas Browne - Keyword(s):

Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross - Keyword(s):

We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.
David Sarnoff - Keyword(s):

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
J.D. Salinger - Keyword(s):

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!
E.M. Cioran - Keyword(s):

Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure.
Mortimer Collins - Keyword(s):

Suicide is... the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
Wilfred Sheed - Keyword(s):