Death Is Certain Life Is Not Quotes & Sayings

Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen. — Flannery O'Connor

A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds. — John Berger

While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought ... There is recompense for suffering. A principle beyond selfishness is at work in the cosmos. . I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false. — David Berlinski

There are certain segments of society that will never lend an ear to a new idea. They squat in a certain place and will not budge from it. They will find many reasons to maintain a way of life that is comfortable to them. They'll cling to old religions; they'll fasten with the grip of death on ethics that were dead, without their knowing it, centuries before; they will embrace a logic that can be blown over with a breath, still claiming it is sacrosanct. — Clifford D. Simak

Oh, there are those who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of irrefutable truth; there are terrible ones, wholly in communion with Satan and his proud spirit. For them hell is voluntary and insatiable; they are sufferers by their own will. For they have cursed themselves by cursing God and life. They feed on their wicked pride, as if a hungry man in the desert were to start sucking his own blood from his body. But they are insatiable unto ages of ages, and reject forgiveness, and curse God who calls to them. They cannot look upon the living God without hatred, and demand that there be no God of life, that God destroy himself and all his creation. And they will burn eternally in the fire of their wrath, thirsting for death and nonexistence. But they will not find death ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. Oh, there are some who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of the absolute truth; there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life. And they will burn in the fire of their own wrath forever and yearn for death and annihilation. But they will not attain to death. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The type of the Inevitable is death. I remember well that in my youth I believed that I was certainly exempt from its operation. First when my daughter died, next when you were wounded, I knew that I was mortal; and now I regard those years as wasted, as unproductive, in which I was not aware that my death was certain, nay, momently possible. I can now appraise at a glance those who have not yet foreseen their death. I know them for the children they are. They think that by evading its contemplation they are enhancing the savor of life. The reverse is true: only those who have grasped their non-being are capable of praising the sunlight. — Thornton Wilder

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy. — Bertrand Russell

If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer. — Yann Martel

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The measure of a man lies not in his lengthy accomplishments, but in his decisions when he is faced with the certain, indisputable knowledge that he is going to die. — Mitch Rowland

It is to be prayed that the mind be sound in a sound body.
Ask for a brave soul that lacks the fear of death,
which places the length of life last among nature's blessings,
which is able to bear whatever kind of sufferings,
does not know anger, lusts for nothing and believes
the hardships and savage labors of Hercules better than
the satisfactions, feasts, and feather bed of an Eastern king.
I will reveal what you are able to give yourself;
For certain, the one footpath of a tranquil life lies through virtue. — Juvenal

I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister. — J.K. Rowling

You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life. — Abigail Thomas

Maybe there's a grand conductor, and maybe there's not. I do happen to believe in God, or the Spirit of Life, or the Force for all I know, but regardless of belief or disbelief, one thing I know for certain is that no matter WHAT or WHO is out there, he or it doesn't "care" if you define "care" in terms of life and death. Nobody is special. Nobody gets a pass. — Johnny B. Truant

I am beginning to see the fallacy in the Western world's take on dying. Too often we are taught that this one life is all there is and when it ends, that's it. Or, instead of once again returning to a loving God who welcomes us back Home with open arms, we are told that when we die we must stand in front of a stern and unforgiving deity who sits on a throne and looks at every mistake we have ever made, deciding if we are good enough to enter heaven. And, if we do make it past that stringent test, we certainly aren't able to visit our friends and family still living. No wonder so many of us are afraid of death. I also find it fascinating that most religions believe in angels or wise ascended souls who brought messages to certain people on earth (Moses and Noah, for example) thousands of years ago, but deny that such an occurrence can happen now. What, did God just decide not to talk to us anymore? — Donna Visocky

Now, on the subject of deterrence, I admit that there can be little doubt that as presently administered in the United States, the death penalty is not a general deterrent to murder in many, if not most, situations. . . .

But of one thing I am certain: it is, by God, a specific deterrent. No one who has been executed has ever taken another innocent life. And until such time as we really mean it as a society when we say 'imprisonment for life,' I, and the families of countless victims, would sleep better at night knowing there is no chance that the worst of these killers will ever again be able to prey on others. Even then, I personally believe that if you choose to take another human life, you ought to be prepared to pay with your own. — John E. Douglas

There had always been a little wiggle room in state abortion laws, because doctors were still permitted to perform them for "therapeutic" reasons - to save a woman's life, for example.7 But what did that mean, exactly? An amicus curiae brief in Roe from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and several other medical groups observed that "a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain. — Katha Pollitt

This is the way that it goes. In your mid forties you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me). But something very interesting happens to you in between.
As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get that sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself; That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods you may want to put it a bit more forcefully. As in: OY!! That went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!! ... Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past. — Martin Amis

Death is not a resident of the house. 'Death' is merely the name we give to certain rooms of the house, rooms that we, the so-called 'living,' fear for the simple reason that we have not passed through them. — Tom Robbins

There are certain human truths, like death, that nobody gets to escape, and pain, which everybody not only feels but needs. You have to go through it. So for everybody, at some point - very often for teenagers - the world is a terrible place. The world is a giant, awful black hole of evil conspiracy. Sometimes that's because you have perspective on what the world's really like, and sometimes it's because you've completely lost perspective and you're having a terrible day. But no matter what, everybody shares that feeling, and life is kind of about your ways around that, your ways around certain truths. — Joss Whedon

If he loves, he wants to make a relationship out of it immediately! He wants to get married. He wants to create a certain conditioning. He wants to make it a contract. Or he enters a church, or he enters a political party, or he enters into any club and he wants to be structured, he wants to know where he stands in the hierarchy, in what relationship. He wants to have an identity - that 'I am this.' He does not want to remain uncertain. And life is uncertain. Only death is certain. — Rajneesh

Being certain one is alive isn't something to which one pays mind. If you could ask the question, you were fine. If you could not, hopefully you had a cozy coffin. — Thomm Quackenbush

In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break. — Terence McKenna

In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain. — Marcel Proust

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of 'Gone With the Wind', and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It's actually one of the things that you live and die for. — Neil Gaiman

My little donkey, if I hadn't shown up, your fate would have been sealed. Love has saved you. Is there anything else that could erase the innate fears of a donkey and send him to rescue you from certain death? No. That is the only one. With a call to arms, I, Ximen Donkey, charged down the ridge and headed straight for the wolf that was tailing my beloved. My hooves kicked up sand and dust as I raced down from my commanding position; no wolf, not even a tiger, could have avoided the spearhead aimed at it. It saw me too late to move out of the way, and I thudded into it, sending it head over heels. Then I turned around and said to my donkey, Do not fear my dear, I am here! — Mo Yan

The way of Jesus is thus not a set of beliefs about Jesus. That people ever thought it was is strange, when we think about it - as if one entered new life by believing certain things to be true, or as if the only people who can be saved are those who know the word "Jesus". Thinking that way virtually amounts to salvation by syllables.
Rather, the way of Jesus is the way of death and resurrection - the path of transition and transformation from an old way of being to a new way of being. To use the language of incarnation that is so central to John, Jesus incarnates the way. Incarnation means embodiment. Jesus is what the way embodied in a human life looks like. — Marcus J. Borg

You don't understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel. And what is history? It is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of symphonies. It is impossible to move on in that direction without a certain uplift. These discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds for it are contained in the Gospel. They are these. First, love of one's neighbor, that highest form of living energy, overflowing man's heart and demanding to be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man, without which he is unthinkable
namely, the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice. — Boris Pasternak

I mean, it's hard to talk about death without realizing that's our end too, right? I am constantly aware of death. It's not that I want to be, but it's a fascination of the mind and it plays a role in why I want to live my life a certain way. The more I am aware of my mortality the better person I am and the better I am at choosing a life that is aware of its beauty. — Ada Limon

He had left a certain mode of life and chosen another and between that life and this a river ran, as impassable as the river of death. And now he wanted to get back madly, desperately, but he couldn't, not even though he knew that the river was nothing but the inhibitions of his own mind ... A normal man who has lived utterly alone for a long time ceases to be normal. A solitary who has cut himself off from human contact comes to have a terror of his fellow humans. A coward who had abandoned all responsibility is afraid to shoulder it again. A failure cannot trust to success. A sufferer who has been broken by life dare not be friends with it again ... It was only his own mind that kept him back but a man's mind can be his greatest friend or his greatest enemy, according as it serves or binds his will, and his was his enemy. Its terrors controlled him. He was bound hand and foot by his own weakness. It was no use. He was a good as dead. I cannot get back. — Elizabeth Goudge

If what we're doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad? On the ramp at night, why do we feel the ungainsayable need to get so brutishly drunk? Why did we make the meadow churn and spit? The flies as fat as blackberries, the vermin, the diseases, ach, scheusslich, schmierig - why? Why do rats fetch 5 bread rations per cob? Why did the lunatics, and only the lunatics, seem to like it here? Why, here, do conception and gestation promise not new life but certain death for both woman and child? Ach, why all der Dreck, der Sumpf, der Schleim? Why do we turn the snow brown? Why do we do that? Make the snow look like the shit of angels. Why do we do that? — Martin Amis

I happen to have a certain fondness for existing
soda wouldn't have that lovely fizzy feeling if you were dead. Think of all the things you would miss: Cartoons, music, movies, video games, music, art, fingernail growth, sex ... well, perhaps not sex, depending on how weird your mortician is. — Jhonen Vasquez

Death is unimportant to a yogi; he does not mind when he is going to die. What happens after death is immaterial to him. He is only concerned with life-with how he can use his life for the betterment of humanity. Having undergone various types of pain in his life and having acquired a certain mastery over pain, he develops compassion to help society and maintains himself in purity and holiness. The yogi has no interest beyond that. — B.K.S. Iyengar

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. — Paul Bowles

Be of good hope in the face of death. Believe in this one truth for certain, that no evil can befall a good man either in life or death, and that his fate is not a matter of indifference to the gods. — Socrates

Except that the poor other man i was to run off with died, remember. Suddenly there is death. Life goes on but he's not here. There are certain recurrent shocks in life, which you can just steady yourself for
you can take a deep breath and it passes by and it doesn't hurt so much. But this is different. He was such a support for me in my head for so long. And now he's not here even to be there. I've managed, however. Actually I've been so heroic I wouldn't recognize myself. — Philip Roth

there's nothing to
discuss
there's nothing to
remember
there's nothing to
forget

it's sad
and
it's not
sad

seems the
most sensible
thing
a person can
do
is
sit
with drink in
hand
as the walls
wave
their goodbye
smiles

one comes through
it
all
with a certain
amount of
efficiency and
bravery
then
leaves

some accept
the possibility of
God
to help them
get
through

others
take it
staight on

and to these

I drink
tonight. — Charles Bukowski

He would be admitting to himself that life has suddenly become very short, very precious, that soon he'll no longer exist, that it'll be over. Of course he knew that, we know that, we say it, but to really, really know it, to be certain of it, is more than he can be right now. His bed is safe. Sleep is easy. He's not a stupid man. — Miriam Toews

How certain are you that this forest is Darken Wood, Raistin?"
"How certain is one of anything, Half-Elven?" the mage replied. "I am not certain of drawing my next breath. But go ahead. Walk into the wood that no living man has ever walked out. Death is life's one great certainty, Tanis."
The half-elf felt a sudden urge to throw Raistlin off the side of the mountain. — Margaret Weis

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his hip, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. — Elizabeth Gaskell

If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended Michael Ivanovich. And when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored. — Leo Tolstoy