Death Quotes

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.
– William Butler Yeats
Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.
– Edward Young
Virtue alone has majesty in death.
– Edward Young
I'm sick to death of people saying we've made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, Infact, we've made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.
– Angus Young
I've always been scared to death of pain-afraid, even, to think of it.
– Loretta Young
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
– John Donne
The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.
– Lois McMaster Bujold
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
– George Santayana
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
– William Shakespeare
Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
– Socrates
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
– Jonathan Swift
The men who had hated [the book], and had not particularly loved Helvétius, flocked round him now. Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional. 'What a fuss about an omelette!' he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,' was his attitude now.
– S. G. Tallentyre
It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub, the task.
– Virgil
Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
– Harold Wilson
If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?
– Chuck Palahniuk
You've gotta know what death is to know life!
– Jack Kevorkian
You should celebrate the end of a love affair as they celebrate death in New Orleans, with songs, laughter, dancing and a lot of wine.
– Francoise Sagan
You realize that however much you don't think about death - or think that's for other people - you're just an organism living from day to day. I'm just grateful I'm here.
– Robin Gibb
You know, I've never actually really believed that death is inevitable. I just think it's a rumor.
– David Carradine
You know Americans are obsessed with life and death and rebirth, that's the American Cycle. You know, awakening, tragic, horrible death and then Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's the American story, again and again.
– Billy Corgan
You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent God, the all-great God, the Almighty God, the most powerful God, the giver of life God, the creator of death. I mean, we're hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.
– Bob Dylan
You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.
– Vance Havner
You don't have people chanting 'Death to America' in Israel.
– Benjamin Netanyahu
You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable, so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.
– David Attenborough
You always think that 70 is the end of the road: 'Somebody died when they were 73 good life'. You're closer to death, and you better make sure you don't waste too much of your time doing things you don't want to do. No point in saying things you don't believe in.
– Ian Mckellen
Yes, people pull the trigger - but guns are the instrument of death. Gun control is necessary, and delay means more death and horror.
– Eliot Spitzer
Women have not yet realized the cowardice that resides, for if they should decide to do so, they would be able to fight you until death and to prove that I speak the truth, amongst so many women, I will be the first to act, setting an example for them to follow.
– Veronica Franco
Why would you be afraid of death? It would be an inconvenience. I have a lot of undone things and it's bound to get in the way. But, no, it doesn't scare me at all.
– David Carradine
Whether you like it or not, you're forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don't fear death, I'm a fatalist. I believe when it's your time, that's it. It's the hand you're dealt.
– Clint Eastwood
Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior.
– Stanislav Grof
Where is the politician who has not promised to fight to the death for lower taxes- and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible?
– Barry Goldwater
Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.
– Mariah Carey
When you think about it, the end of the world is a little bit like death: We all know it's going to come eventually, and as we get older, we feel we see the signs more and more distinctly.
– John Hodgman
When we play 'Angel of Death', it's actually a 2 and half minutes sing 'til our party starts. That song is pretty much been played traditionally in the end.
– Kerry King
When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace, and death a duty.
– W. C. Fields
When we are dealing with death we are constantly being dragged down by the event: Humor diverts our attention and lifts our sagging spirits.
– Allen Klein
When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.
– Ralph Fiennes
When the courts decide that murderers, rapists, and others who maliciously break our social contract deserve health care that most working Americans can't afford, they are condemning good people to death.
– Tammy Bruce
When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.
– Russell Baker
When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.
– Steven Morrissey
When I was younger, I wasn't concentrating on good days. I was managing a career and trying to have a good year. It would always 'lead' to something, which never leads to anything except death, where everything leads to. And then as I got older, and then I had my kids and everything, I began to appreciate a great Wednesday.
– Albert Brooks
When I was on a major label I felt obliged to say yes to every interview, tour and whatever else. The label is always telling you, 'This ain't going to last,' so I worked myself half to death. I learnt from that and I like to pace myself now.
– Adam Ant
When I see someone who is starved, they don't look alert. They don't have boundless energy. If you're too skinny, it looks like you're near death.
– Kirstie Alley
When I die, don't let my death stop the resistance.
– Muqtada al Sadr
When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.
– Maurice Sendak
When faith is lost, when honor dies, the man is dead.
– John Greenleaf Whittier
When death has you by the throat, you don't mince words.
– Friedrich Durrenmatt
When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death. Fascism was all aesthetics. There was no core principle to it. There was no truth to it.
– John Cusack
What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.
– Henry Van Dyke
What is the value of sticking a microphone in a man's face right after he has learned of his wife's death?
– Jessica Savitch
What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!
– Rita Dove
Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'
– Christopher Hitchens
Well, there's a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.
– Miguel de Cervantes
We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.
– Bjorn Lomborg
We were then in a dangerous, helpless situation, exposed daily to perils and death amongst savages and wild beasts, not a white man in the country but ourselves.
– Daniel Boone
We were aware of the fact that death walks hand in hand with struggle.
– Stokely Carmichael
We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.
– Doug Coupland
We see death constantly on film.
– Michael Sheen
We live in grief for having left the womb, for having left the teat, then school, then home. In my case, it was leaving marriages, and the death of my wife.
– William Shatner
We have abolished the death penalty for humans, so why should it continue for animals?
– Brigitte Bardot
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
– Umberto Eco
We do not celebrate the death of our enemies.
– Yitzhak Rabin
We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.
– David Sarnoff
We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo - men, women and children. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
– Robert McNamara
We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.
– Robert Falcon Scott
We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.
– Jonathan Kozol
We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It's a death trap.
– Anthony Hopkins
We all pay for life with death, so everything in between should be free.
– Bill Hicks
Washington, not Jefferson, freed his slaves upon his death.
– Stephen Ambrose
War is not the only arena where peace is done to death.
– Aung San Suu Kyi
Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.
– Jane Smiley
Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.
– Dan Savage
True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.
– Stendhal
Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.
– Daniel Barenboim
To some extent I liken slavery to death.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
To have the truth in your possession you can be found guilty, sentenced to death.
– Peter Tosh
To have been torn from the study would have been as death my time was entirely occupied with art.
– John James Audubon
To die for one's country is such a worthy fate that all compete for so beautiful a death.
– Pierre Corneille
To be immortal is commonplace except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
– Jorge Luis Borges
To be honest, I'm scared to death of rollercoaster rides.
– Liam Neeson
To be clear, climate change is a true 800 pound gorilla in the room. The effects of global warming threaten global environmental upheaval over the coming century. But for South Florida and the Everglades, it could be our death knell if urgent action is not taken.
– Debbie Wasserman Schultz
To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.
– Sammy Davis, Jr.
To a billion people around the world surviving on just a dollar a day, the question of what to eat tonight is more about life and death than about recipes. The struggle of poor people around the globe weighs heavily on me, especially now that I am a mother, which is why I work with Oxfam.
– Giada De Laurentiis
Though I am a Catholic, a professing one, I have serious doubts about the survival of the human personality after death.
– Taylor Caldwell
Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.
– Wilson Mizner
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
There's stuff I don't like to rehearse, really emotional things, I don't like to rehearse. You just beat it to death.
– Kat Dennings
There's something about death that is comforting. The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to appreciate your life now.
– Angelina Jolie
There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain.
– Lewis Thomas
There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.
– H. G. Wells
There is something about poverty that smells like death.
– Zora Neale Hurston
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
– Samuel Butler
There is nothing glamorous about death.
– Roger Moore
There is no harm in patience, and no profit in lamentation. Death is easier to bear (than) that which precedes it, and more severe than that which comes after it. Remember the death of the Apostle of God, and your sorrow will be lessened.
– Abu Bakr
There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.
– Stanislav Grof
There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
– Soren Kierkegaard
There are some people who walk into a room and they oxygenate it, by their very being there's fresh air. Then there are those who come in with the smell of death and they suck the life out.
– Peter Mullan
There are people who never experience that, who remain closed until death, from fear of change.
– Isabelle Adjani
There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.
– Jane Smiley
There are certain people that are marked for death. I have my little list of those that treated me unfairly.
– Jennifer Lopez