Death Is Reality Quotes & Sayings

The erruption of feelings & emotions that follows a near-death exerience, or any event that causes us to stop & look deeply at the reality of our lives, is ripe with the potential for insight & clarity. — Allan Lokos

Even under more ingratiating conditions than rocket travel, this new conquest has already disclosed drawbacks quite as remarkable as its advantages. On a transcontinental flight by a jet plane approaching super-sonic speed, the actual trip is so cramped, so dull, so vacuous, that the only attraction the air lines dare to offer are those vulgar experiences one can have by walking to the nearest cabaret, restaurant, or cinema: liquor, food, motion pictures, luscious stewardesses. Only a lurking sense of fear and the possibility of a grisly death help restore the sense of reality. — Lewis Mumford

And the chief difference is this: that people will treat with disdain such phenomena as are proved by the evidence of the senses, and commonly experienced - while they will defend to the death the reality of a phenomenon which they have neither seen nor experienced. "Faith is as powerful a force as science," he concluded, voice soft in the darkness, " - but far more dangerous. — Diana Gabaldon

That is an incredible period I think when you have a near-death experience. You are really understanding that there is a greater self than the physical body, and the cosmic anatomy as I call it is suspended and physical, is almost attached to it but not quite, and you're living in that in-between sphere of apparent reality around you and then the real reality of the infiniteness of it all. — Maya Tiwari

For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind's lack of pity, mankind's fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare. — Mary Webb

Repetition and familiarity work. What is repeated becomes familiar, and this becomes a part of us. Our own culture understands this, but alas, not always the church. Far too many equate ritual with spiritual dryness. True, ritual and liturgy can be dead
even using the terms can raise hackles
but only when the significance and power of those rituals are forgotten. Spiritual death is not a property of ritual itself. To the contrary, ritual has always been and will always be a means of securing for future generations the power and reality of the gospel. (Peter Enns, Exodus, page 262). — Peter Enns

In brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die. — George Pattison

To be or not to be, that is not a question, because reality transcends both notions of birth and death, of being and non-being. — Thich Nhat Hanh

To ignore death and to be afraid of it is dumb because everyone is going to face it at some point. If you look at death and the reality of it, you realize that we're all going to die, so let's use this time on Earth to be positive and do good things. — Ray Toro

Literature is a source of pleasure, he said, it is one of the rare inexhaustible joys in life, but it's not only that. It must not be disassociated from reality. Everything is there. That is why I never use the word fiction. Every subtlety in life is material for a book. He insisted on the fact. Have you noticed, he'd say, that I'm talking about novels? Novels don't contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder: What would I have done? It's a question you have to ask yourself. Listen carefully: it is a way to learn to live. There are grown-ups who would say no, that literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are wrong. Literature performs, instructs, it prepares you for life. — Laurence Cosse

It made a romantic tale. The young rouge, cheating death, returning to his grieving lover. But in reality? Ashyn had always known life did not resemble one of her book stories or Moria's bard tales, and yet there was a part of her that hoped it did. The more she saw, the more she realized she was wrong. People made up stories because that is what they wanted from their world. A place where goodness, kindness, and honor were rewarded. They were not rewarded. The people of Edgewood could attest to that. - Sea Of Shadows — Kelly Armstrong

Our realization of eternity is nourished by our praise and thanksgiving to Christ. The more we nourish our eternal reality, the more real it becomes to us. The more real it becomes to us, the more others will see Christ in us and desire Him. This is how Paul's joy was unaffected by the sufferings of this life and even death. — Brad L. Burge

For most of us, karma and negative emotions obscure the ability to see our own intrinsic nature, and the nature of reality. As a result we clutch on to happiness and suffering as real, and in our unskillful and ignorant actions go on sowing the seeds of our next birth. Our actions keep us bound to the continuous cycle of worldly existence, to the endless round of birth and death. So everything is at risk in how we live now at this very moment: How we live now can cost us our entire future. — Sogyal Rinpoche

When your head is smashing into the concrete you don't have question about whether it's a real sensation. And ultimately, that's what's going to unmake us all - smashing up against the physical reality of death and decay, and being unmade. — Will Sheff

The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking
but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied. — Zygmunt Bauman

DOCTOR: Oh. My, God! Oh, it's bigger!
RIVER: Well, yes.
DOCTOR: On the inside,
RIVER: We need to concentrate.
DOCTOR: Than it is
RIVER: I know where you're going with this, but I need you to calm down.
DOCTOR: On the outside!
RIVER: You've certainly grasped the essentials.
DOCTOR: My entire understanding of physical space has been transformed! Three-dimensional Euclidean geometry has been torn up, thrown in the air and snogged to death! My grasp of the universal constants of physical reality has been changed forever. — The Doctor

To me there is nothing more sacred than love and laughter, and there is nothing more prayerful than playfulness. When you are in love, all fears disappear, and when you become love yourself, even death becomes irrelevant. Jesus is not very far away from the truth when he says, "God is love." Certainly God is power, the greatest power. I want to improve upon Jesus: I don't say God is love, I say love is God. To me God is only a symbol and love is a reality. God is only a myth - love is the experience of millions of people. God is only a word, but love can become a dance in your heart. — Rajneesh

Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sense of purposefulness or acknowledge the meaninglessness of life. We can seek to escape the drudgery and pain of life through alcohol, drugs, or pleasure seeking, or by working to support our families and create artistic testaments to our worldly existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content. — Robert E. Howard

I believe that the world is dying, not just me. And fantasy will save no one. The deathly unreality of Utopia, the merchandizing of Utopia is wicked, deadly reality. — Harold Brodkey

Sometimes it seems to me that God 's way of dealing with me is not to let me see much of my friends, those who are most to me in the spiritual life, lest I should forget that the invisible bond is the only reality. That is the only way I can reconcile myself to the inevitable separations of life and death. — Lucy Larcom

He gets away with it because he's strong.'
'This is the story of mankind.'
'I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.'
'Yes. But then I read the newspaper. — Christopher Buehlman

To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance. — Eric Hoffer

Fleeing persecution is not a crime. And we do not seek to pander to a noisy, tiny minority who will never embrace modern multicultural Australia. But there are important truths we must face. There is a history and a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge before us is real, the questions we grapple with as elemental as life and death. — Bill Shorten

They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Aeolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule. — Stendhal

And so we have the result noted: the resources of God's kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life. To counteract this we must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God's rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. We can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now. — Dallas Willard

We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases — Thomas Browne

Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death. — Heraclitus

The intense roller coaster of emotions will gradually lesson over time. But there is no timeframe for the grieving process, and it will not be rushed, no matter how fast you'd like to "get over it." The reality is that there is no getting over it; you can only walk through it. — Elizabeth Berrien

Writing ... is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world - it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one's pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light - in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it - approaches blasphemy. — John Updike

I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly ... I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try. — Marilynne Robinson

These people know the reality and laugh at it. Such laughter has little concern with what is funny. It is often bitter and sometimes a little mad, for it is the laugh under the mask of tragedy, and also the laughter that masks tears. They are the same. It is the laughter of people who value love and friendship and plenty, who have lived with terror and death and hate. - , Return to Laughter (1954) — Elenore Smith Bowen

It is a symbol evoking a reality that touches the depths of the person ... the light of goodness that vanquishes evil, of love that overcomes hatred, of life that defeats death. — Pope Benedict XVI

There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to "make it." But I have never been able to find any basis in scriptural tradition or psychological reality to think this might be so. What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? What would one do in heaven with a debauched character or a hate-filled heart? — Dallas Willard

[after the death of a loved one] It is when there is nothing more to be done that the reality of the loss often hits with full force. — Judith Martin

The dream they dream is beautiful. A dream as bold as your own, or bolder. You want to explore and colonize the universe; they wish to extend the lifespan of the universe beyond all boundaries, to remake its laws, and shape reality to banish entropy, decay, and death forever. I'd like to believe in that dream whether it's true or not. — John C. Wright

The only thing set in stone are dumb quotes and names of dead people. Everything else is subject to change. — Kimberly Spencer

Sleep occupies a third of our life. It is the consolation to the woes of our days or the woe of their pleasures; but I have never found that sleep was a rest. After a swoon of a few minutes a new life begins, freed from conditions of time and space, and doubtless like the life which awaits us after death. Who knows whether there does not exist a link between these two existences, and whether it is not possible for the soul now to bind them together? — Gerard De Nerval

In the event of total freedom, the desire to dominate rules just as tyrannically as it does with centrally-planned economies. Freedom gave us capitalism, which has come to mean bosses ordering workers about. Workers aren't free; they are chained by their biological needs. Where is their freedom? Oh, the freedom of mobility? They can quit their jobs and work elsewhere? They can switch from one slave-owner to another? The capitalist vision ignores the capitalist reality, which is that bosses tells workers what to do under pain of death by starvation. Tell me that is freedom some more. Tell me another good one. — Robert Peate

I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I'm rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my "essential saltes" as it were, I'm the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang. — Laird Barron

But I can't control my dreams. I can't even remember them. For all I know I'm having the time of my life when I sleep, but I just can't remember. So I'm forced to live in a life I have no control over. A life where I'm either numb to everything or terrified of every thought that crosses my mind. If this is all just a dream, then it sure is a disappointing one.

But I still have time to try and control my dreams. I have time to try and make my dreams a reality in this waking life as well. The one bloody thing I have is time. I've got to remember that. I still have time. And despite everything, there is something reassuring about that. — F.K. Preston

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading.
- The Novel as Research. (1968) — Michel Butor

When you're young your reality is accepted by most. When you're older, your reality changes and that seems to upset most people. — Solange Nicole

We live in a bubble of the fantasy of death, but the reality of it is something that we obviously all face and have to deal with, at some point. — Michael Sheen

I have said that the attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness. Not surprisingly, most psychotherapy patients (and probably most non-patients, since neurosis is the norm rather than the exception) have a problem, whether they are young or old, in facing the reality of death squarely and clearly. What — M. Scott Peck

In our confusion, we're accustomed to according the titles of good news and "a positive message" to the most soul-sucking, sentimental fare imaginable. Any song or story that deals with conflict by way of a strained euphemistic spin, a cliche, or a triumphal cupcake ending strikes us as the best in family entertainment. This is the opposite of apocalyptic. Apocalyptic maximizes the reality of human suffering and folly before daring a word of hope. The hope has nowhere else to happen but the valley of the shadow of death. — David Dark

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.
This is surely the death of all thought.
This quote is taken from "The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art" by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7. — Mark Rothko

Worry is different from fear. If fear is like a raging fever, worry is a low-grade temperature. It nags at us, simmers in our souls, hovers in the back of our minds like a faint memory. We may fear certain realities, like death; we worry about vague possibilities. Worry distracts us more than paralyzes us. It is like a leaky faucet we never get around to fixing. — Gerald Lawson Sittser

If all we know of mind is the aspect of mind that dissolves when we die, we will be left with no idea of what continues, no knowledge of the new dimension of the deeper reality of the nature of mind. So it is vital for us all to familiarize ourselves with the nature of mind while we are still alive. Only then will we be prepared for the time when it reveals itself spontaneously and powerfully at the moment of death; be able to recognize it "as naturally," the teachings say, "as a child running into its mother's lap"; and by remaining in that state, finally be liberated. — Sogyal Rinpoche

Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality. — Andre Breton

Because it is the nature of Dreams, and ONLY of Dreams, to define Reality. Destiny is bound to existence. Death is limited by what she will or will not accept. — Neil Gaiman

In reality, we don't die, but merely change. Energy reveals and hides itself repeatedly as it flows along. The flame of life flickers on and off, again and again. How could the flame going out for a brief time signify extinction? There is no life and death separate from the infinite life energy of the cosmos. The phenomena of life energy merely change and cycle in accordance with the law of infinite energy. — Ilchi Lee

The reason 'closure' is a cliche is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn't in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships and much else in life is rarely achieved; only death brings closure and then not always for those still living. — Joseph Epstein

I've come to believe that God, in His wisdom, allows martyrdom in every generation in part because, without them, the reality of Christ's death for us becomes increasingly blurry ... As we look at [the martyrs], the mist that sometimes enshrouds first-century Golgotha is burned away, and we see ... the Lord nailed to the cross. — Mark Galli

I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I'm wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it's nature I believe in rather than some spiritual thing.
Interviewer: You're not a religious man?
No. And I do suppose that science has taken, to a large extent and for a number of people, has taken the place of religion.
Interviewer: What do you mean by that?
That one can have more belief in scientific cures or scientific miracles than you do in God miracles. It's inevitable that we will eventually diffuse into nothingness ... — Bill Blass

Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual's reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it. — Tony Hillerman

Do observe what is actually taking place within yourself and outside yourself in the competitive culture in which you live with its desire for power, position, prestige, name, success and all the rest of it - observe the achievements of which you are so proud, this whole field you call living in which there is conflict in every form of relationship, breeding hatred, antagonism, brutality and endless wars. This field, this life, is all we know, and being unable to understand the enormous battle of existence we are naturally afraid of it and find escape from it in all sorts of subtle ways. And we are frightened also of the unknown - frightened of death, frightened of what lies beyond tomorrow. So we are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there isno hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theo- logical concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Expose yourself to aloneness. When a person is left alone, he starts thinking of higher reality - about death, life, soul, God and the mystery of all. — Chinmayananda Saraswati

So, preferring death to capture, I accomplished the most astonishing deeds, and which, more then once, showed me that the too great care we take of our bodies is the only obstacle to the sucess of those projects which require rapid decision, and vigorous and determined execution.
In reality, when you have once devoted your life to your enterprises, you are no longer the equal of other men, or, rather, other men are no longer your equals, and whosoever has taken this resolution, feels his strength and resources doubled. — Alexandre Dumas

Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography. — Nobuyoshi Araki

And what's wrong with dimming the harsh reality of life a little, anyway? In essence, being alive is a bloody long and hard walk to death. Why not make it as pleasant along the way as you can? — Lucinda Riley

The problem with trying to find your happiness through avoidance is the nature of reality. Reality simply does not allow us to evade unwanted experiences. Sure, we might be able to escape a few {...] but the evasive life often comes at a cost, like having to live your life in terror. Even if we can successfully ward off some terrifying experiences, we can not advert them all. Particularly, the most unpleasant ones: sickness, old age and death. If our strategy has been to flea unpleasant circumstances, when they come to meet us - as they surely will - our suffering will be great indeed. — Mark W. Muesse

[ ... ] I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death. — Russell Banks

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind
and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town. — William Faulkner

If we constantly apply ourselves to meditation practice during the course of our lives, we may be able, though with some difficulty, to strip away all the supports that maintain the illusion of the ego-self. However, the material fabric of the ego's support-bot the world and the physical body-is destroyed by death and all contact with its "friends" is severed. Now the mind is truly left to its own devices and its experience of reality is much more direct and immediate. The worldly concerns which formerly served as the support of the ego have all been stripped away and the insubstantial nature of its condition has been exposed in all its falsity. It was never really real at all, and the awesome power of this truth may strike the consciousness like a bombshell! — Stephen Hodge

[We assume] that the self is an actual living thing, but it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death. — Thandie Newton

People believe mistakenly, that with death comes atonement, when in reality, life is for atonement and Death is for Judgment. — Thomas Perez

I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity. — Douglas Coupland

Let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work. — Yukio Mishima

Fiction is just a mirror of reality for the most part. Many things that happen in fiction don't even happen here. But as far as pain and sadness. Joy and love, life and death, it's all real here. Here it's real. — Lucian Bane

But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The seas, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death
these are things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving towards realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure. — Albert Camus

Another Weeping Woman
Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.
Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world
Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves,
And you are pierced by a death. — Wallace Stevens

Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death. — Guy Sajer

The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times ... But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature. — Ferdinand Cohn

There's and entire world outside these bleak pages, one full of SUNRISES and KITTY-CATS and late-night BURRITO RUNS and the horrible, creaking amble of us all towards DEATH. It is to that world that I am afraid I must release you to now. — David Malki

Atheism became the salvation of the wise and it was common knowledge that if God is for you then reality was against you. Among the core beliefs that the survivors shared, there were two considered supreme: the right to life, and the wisdom that God was just an imaginary being the religious used to deny the permanence of death. — C.J. Anderson

Why live unless you live large? Death is a reality, always present, waiting, with that in mind, live today, it is everything you own. — Jason Goodman

When we die our money, fame, and honors will be meaningless. We own nothing in this world. Everything we think we own is in reality only being loaned to us until we die. And on our deathbed at the moment of death, no one but God can save our souls. — Michael Huffington

The world, as it is, is not a permanent reality, but is a temporary product of our choices as creators. — Bryant McGill

It was strange how in that moment of tragedy, it had seemed so unreal, like an old-fashioned movie reel playing on a screen for my eyes only. The pain and broken heart were blocked off for a little while, leaving me numb with disbelief. Shock is what Dad called it. But after a while, the cruel reality started to seep into my tissues, and my body became a sponge, just sucking it all up until, finally, there was so much grief inside, I couldn't help feeling it.
That's how it happened for me. First, the numbness right after she died, next the agonising pain and then the place I was at now - the land of perpetual depression. — Karen Ann Hopkins

Self discovery doesn't not seek to bring you answers about your personal life or philosophically comfort you about life and death. What it does is bring you into reality as perception itself. — Frederick Lenz

My sister lived in the moment. She said she would love the summer only when it came and warmed her. But I lived and still live in the future. Where it's warm when it's cold. Where dreams are not yet reality. Where the sad people are happy. The only problem with living in the future is that everyone has died, including yourself. So your plans are fiction and your predictions are fantasy. Living in the future is pure fantasy. I think that's why I love it so dearly. — F.K. Preston

Being trampled almost to death by a preoccupied troll is almost the ideal cure for a person confused about what is real and what isn't. Reality is something walking heavily up your spine. — Terry Pratchett

I realise now that the pain Kevin felt - that night, and for nearly eighteen months beforehand, since his suicide attempt - was no less real, no less urgent, than a heart attach, a stroke, a seizure. Than the sensation of running too hard or running too fast, keeling over, grasping for air. Wishing for something to fill your lungs - to rush in and then revive you - except nothing ever does, and maybe nothing ever can.

It is unpleasant, of course, to sympathise with suicide. It is unpleasant to believe in a reality in which death is the only option. And it is problematic, certainly, to compare suicide to running, to cardiac arrest, to terminal cancer. But this is precisely the problem: There is no fair parallel that can be drawn between those who felt the dark pull of suicide and those who never have. — Amy E. Butcher

There is no corelation between life and death, except that life is the biggest lie we believed, while death; is the most certain truth. — Husam Wafaei

Being-in-the-world means that I am inextricably knit into the fabric of this fluid, indivisible, and contingent reality I share with others. There is no room for a disembodied mind or soul, however subtle, to float free from this condition, to contemplate it from a hypothetical Archimedean point outside. Without such a mind or soul, it is hard to conceive of anything that will go on into another life once this one comes to an end. My actions, like the words of dead philosophers, may continue to reverberate and bear fruits long after my death, but I will not be around to witness them. — Stephen Batchelor

For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people - a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance. - William Longgood, The Queen Must Die — Susan Wiggs

We think that we are living when we walk upon the earth but the very moment we "die" there, we wake up here! This life on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge is the real one. We find that our life on earth was just a dream, a dream designed to lead us further and further into love. True love grows and then cannot be destroyed. It grows and grows until it is stronger than death. — Kate McGahan

This time it is real - all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death! — John Muir

The truth is I don't know what happens to the spirits of the dead when they leave this world. Priests may claim to, even Truthseeker may claim to. However nobody truly knows. All Truthseeker truly knows is that Ishar, Kirfell, Orion and Avanti are lies. He has no proof of an alternative. I don't know. There may be nothing beyond this dark reality we live in, but that doesn't feel right to me. We love, we hate, we fight, we strive... People's lives seem too complex and important to be simply extinguished like a candle.'

~Vexis Zaelwarsh
Deathsworn Arc 5: The Temple of the Mad God — Martyn Stanley

He actually believes that she was murdered. The reality is, of course, also, that his car, his driver, were involved in this crash therefore there will be people that believe that he is ultimately responsible not only for the death of his own son, but for the death of the princess. — Robert Jobson

That is why humans resist life. To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest
fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we
really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our lives trying
to satisfy other people's demands. We have learned to live by other people's points of view because of
the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else. — Miguel Ruiz

The cross is not a sign of the church's quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church's revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's. The cross stands as God's (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God's eternal yes to humanity, God's remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices. — Stanley Hauerwas

Unfulfilled dreams, ongoing relational tension, the loss of friendships, a hard marriage, rebellious teenagers, the death of loved ones, remaining sinful patterns - whatever it is for you - live long enough, lose enough, suffer enough, and the idealism of youth fades, leaving behind the reality of life in a broken world as a broken person. — Tullian Tchividjian

Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life. As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. he must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it. We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves. Technically we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one's inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition. — Ernest Becker

Birth is okay and death is okay, if we know that they are only concepts in our mind. Reality transcends both birth and death. — Thich Nhat Hanh

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life. — P.D. James

That all opposites - such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death - are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say that "ultimate reality is a unity of opposites" is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere. — Ken Wilber

The Cross of Christ is to be a reality to me not only once for all at my conversion, but all through my life as a Christian. True spirituality does not stop at the negative (death), but without the negative - in comprehension and in practice - we are not ready to go on. — Francis A. Schaeffer

To the extent that we are trapped by the overvaluing, idealizing tendency, we are not free fully to celebrate the limited but real goods of creation. Idolatry by definition is not an accurate assessment of creaturely goods, but an overvaluing of them so as to miss the richness of their actual, limited values. If I worship my tennis trophies, my Mondrian, my family tree, my Kawasaki, or my bank account, then I do not really receive those goods for what they actually are - limited, historical, and finite - goods which are vulnerable to being taken away by time and death. When I pretend that a value is something more than it is, ironically I value it less appropriately than it deserves. Biblical psychology invites us to relate ourselves absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative. — Thomas C. Oden