Death Philosophy Quotes & Sayings

Takes birth in me,
also, dies in debris.
I am a Potpourri.

A mix of dead petals,
effusing divine fragrance.
Walking on the journey,
of controversy.

I am a Potpourri. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

No matter how much you love someone, time heals your pain and your death wish. — Parul Wadhwa

A decent life, even a short life, will always be far better than an exceptionally long life lived in ruin. — Steven J. Carroll

Everything is only a transition — Lailah Gifty Akita

Our failure to see and access the pure joy and radiance of life is owning to a lack of awareness. In any situation there is beauty. Even at the moment of one's death there is beauty. — Frederick Lenz

In the presence of death, no philosophy of life can feel triumphant! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Sacrificing earth to paradise is like leaving your fortune to a corpse. I'm not that stupid. Duped by the Infinite! I am nothing; I call myself Count Nothing, the senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Will I after my death? No. What am I? A little dust surrounding an organism. What do I have to do on this earth? I have the choice of pain or pleasure. Where will pain lead me? To nothing. But I will have suffered. Where will pleasure lead me? To nothing. But I will have enjoyed. My choice is made. I must eat or be eaten, and I choose to eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. That's my philosophy. — Victor Hugo

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face — Ian Fleming

There are a lot of little lessons that can be taught around the home without sitting a child down and boring them to death with your philosophy of life! — Helen McCrory

Once someone asked me, "What do you want to be your epitaph?" So I said, "Paulo Coelho died when he was alive. — Paulo Coelho

This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. — Rumi

Death is the destiny of every man.
Every man must know this to live wisely. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Would we believe their story; if the dead should return? — Lailah Gifty Akita

The expansion of this country was accomplished at the cost of decimation to the Native American population. The American Indian death toll due to the United States' march to the Pacific was massive. Much of the land we stole from the Native Americans is uninhabited to this day; basically, the Indians could have stayed where they were. Had America expanded its boundaries yet been true to its conscience, the American Indian nations could have remained intact. And were there a greater prevalence of Native American philosophy and culture in the United States today, the life of our nation would be immeasurably enriched. — Marianne Williamson

The life of every man is a way to himself, an attempt at a way, the suggestion of a path. No man has ever been utterly himself, yet every man strives to be so, the dull, the intelligent, each one as best he can. Each man to the end of his days carries round with him vestiges of his birth - the slime and egg-shells of the primeval world. There are many who never become humans; they remain frogs, lizards, ants. Many men are human being above and fish below. Yet each one represents an attempt on the part of nature to create a human being. — Hermann Hesse

Death is the transcendence of life to a new level to begin an endless eternal life. — Debasish Mridha

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death
ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. — James Baldwin

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I'm too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She's waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I'm eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I'm so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? — F.K. Preston

All snowmen look to the sky, knowing their death will be delivered by the horizon. Before dawn, their life becomes the darkest. The moment before the sun burns all.
The Snowmen go mental. Kill or be killed.
I only just escaped the violent puddles, the sticks and stones.
The broken carrot noses. — Craig Stone

Swiftly the remembrance of all things is buried in the gulf of eternity. — Marcus Aurelius

belief is the death of intelligence. — Robert Anton Wilson

Live life daringly. In one moment in time, you will be gone. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I believe in the inherent good of people. I believe that someone can make a mistake and live to redeem themselves another day. Maybe that's why I don't believe in the death penalty. It forecloses all possibilities. — Carsen Taite

There is an end to everything even life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

But where were the other Old World monsters? I wondered. How did other vampires exist in a world in which each death was recorded in giant electronic computers, and bodies were carried away to refrigerated crypts? Probably concealing themselves like loathsome insects in the shadows, as they have always done, no matter how much philosophy they talked or how many covens they formed. Well, when I raised my voice with the little band called Satan's Night Out, I would bring them all into the light soon enough. — Anne Rice

Embodied courage chooses not to wait until illness or notice of death demands attention. — Jack Kornfield

Science does not see beyond the atom interacting with atom, the chemicals interacting with chemicals. The scientist cannot see the impressive existence of himself. Academics will never learn the meaning of life because they don't feel it; they can only accept its existence as fact. "I think therefore I am." And yet, thought is a cloud reflecting the impressions of a consciousness. I am therefore I think. The academic mind does not appreciate life in the festive sense therefore - derailed to love by a numb perspective. Life is an unknown, death is a mystery; no, life is a mystery, death is the unknown - in the sense that I will un-know my self in death. Science ignores the ultimate question in pursuance of the distant things, the most superficial things. One must discover from the inside out to discover he is made of nothing, and in that supreme emptiness, he is connected directly to everything that he studies. — Matthew Holbert

The sky is but a looking glass into a pool of airless oceans, cast off into a dance of light and energy, leaving only a facet of guidance to navigate. Such an existence lays but within the mind man. — Indiana Lang

There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors. — Frank Herbert

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation - becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure - as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form. — The Invisible Committee

At the time of death, life may end, but I will continue to live in this beautiful world among my beloved new and old friends. — Debasish Mridha

A mother is an individual who'd go to any length for someone else, beyond rationality, beyond her physical body, her social bindings of state, country, her kind. That's the most horrifying individual you'll ever meet. — E.J. Koh

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men do not.
The essentials of the dead man's life
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight
will abide forever.
Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue
when it is the lives of others that will make that happen,
as you yourself are the mirror and image
of those who did not live as long as you
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth. — Jorge Luis Borges

What a more beautiful world this would be if we didn't wait til people were dead before we honored their spirit. — Kellie Elmore

Life was a bloody battlefield until I conquered the enemy and won the war. Now, life is a journey, and I am a warrior. Prepared for anything and weakened by nothing. There are hills and dales, mountains and plateaus, blind spots and brilliant vistas, but none of that matters. All that matters is my second chance, and the only thing capable of disrupting my path, is myself. — B.G. Bowers

The greatest loss is the lost of life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

My creativity keeps me from starving. Humanity keeps my life mundane. Loving secures my love for life, but my imagination keeps me sane. — F.K. Preston

Live each day as if life can end any time. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I die a little everyday, in trying to revive what I lost yesterday! — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Death is the final dance of dreams, desires, loves and hopes. — Debasish Mridha

Our job is improving the quality of life, not just delaying death. — Robin Williams

But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Sum of life; Birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, parenthood, old age and death. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Death is not the beginning of an endless deep, dark, silent night but the beginning of a bright, joyful, eternal light. — Debasish Mridha

Death means nothing to us — Epicurus

Drink deep the cup of life; take it's dark wine into your soul. For it passes round the table only once. — Jack McDevitt

Death is Perfection's reflection. One cannot be the other, but without one, the other suffers. — Solange Nicole

I have come more and more to the belief that we owe our arts a thousand times what we are paying them. We support our cigarette factories, soap manufacturers, beauticians, all the luxury and pleasure businesses of our over-indulged civilization, but we pay our painters an average wage ... and yet when the future digs us from the past they won't care how we smell, what we smoke, or if we bathed. All they'll know of us will be our architecture, our paintings, sculpture, poems, laws, philosophy, drama, our pottery and fabrics, the things which our hands made and our minds thought up - oh, the machines they'll dig up too, but perhaps they'll point to them as our destruction, the wheels that drove us down to death. — Vincent Price

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. — F.K. Preston

Most people live out ordinary lives by denying death. Others live more completely because they're aware of it. I choose the second group. — Alan Joshua

The most sublime efforts of philosophy can extend no farther than feebly to point out the desire, the hope, or, at most, the probability, of a future state, there is nothing, except a divine revelation, that can ascertain the existence, and describe the condition of the invisible country which is destined to receive the souls of men after their separation from the body. — Edward Gibbon

Life is not profound without its own tragedy. It humbles us. Sets the bar for our introspection. Keeps us from believing we are gods. Puts our egos in check. — Crystal Evans

The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake. — Tim O'Brien

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out. — Georges Bataille

We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into life.-Martin Luther King Jr. — Maya Angelou

We all reach a point that is the limit of our understanding. When we stare over the precipice of uncertainty and into the dark unknown that we cannot explain with hard evidence, that is when we trade understanding for belief. At best, we make an educated guess. At worst, we make blind leaps of faith. — Ramsey Isler

Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism. — Sigmund Freud

Medicine rests upon four pillars - philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements - that is to say, of the whole cosmos - and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars. — Paracelsus

I have a serious question."
"I will give a serious answer."
"Can a god be killed?"
The humor drained from Roman's face. "Well, that depends on if you're a pantheist or a Marxist."
"What's the difference?"
"The first believes that divinity is the universe. The two are synonymous and nonexistent without each other. The second believes in anthropocentrism, seeing man in the center of the universe, and god as just an invention of human conscience. Of course, if you follow Nietzsche, you can kill God just by thinking about him. — Ilona Andrews

Life's a circle. There are no lines we can cross. — F.K. Preston

Life can end any time, any day. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help. — Hannah Arendt

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life. — Bertrand Russell

Mary remained weeping for her friend Jesus who had been all the world to her, and whose death ad meant the loss of that world. With great courage to be alone, and great courage to love despite devastating loss, she struggled to carry on, hoping to find and rebury Jesus' missing body. Suddenly Jesus stood before her alive again, calling her name. She turned, reaching, and said "Rabbouni!" "Noli me tangere," he replied- "don't touch me." If the courage to be alone requires also the courage to love, the courage to love still does not overcome loneliness. — Robert Cummings Neville

[T]hose who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men. — Plato

Death is the beginning of a new life, not the end of the life.
You may leave this world but not our heart, you will live there for ever. — Debasish Mridha

Instead there is a sense that life and death are connected, and that because the way you live is going to affect the way you die, the point of philosophy is to learn to die well. — Bri

Death isn't the end, it's the beginning. — Jennifer Love Hewitt

Love is the strongest bond. Nothing can break it, not even death. — Debasish Mridha

We do not fear death.
We fear not having lived enough. — Manoj Vaz

And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink. — Federico Garcia Lorca

After I die if I am buried I will rot. If I am burnt I will become ash but if my body is donated I will live to give life and happiness to many."
"Live life after death - pledge to donate your body. — Amit Abraham

Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers. The muddlers-through.
Politics is full of them ... so is businesses ... so is the church. They're popular. Successful. Some of them work hard, other are slack, but all of them could tell a good story.
Never where there such charming gravediggers in the world's history. — James Hilton

Was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn't get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there. — Charles Dickens

I support Democrats and Republicans. And I'm telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he's gone, everybody's going to be sitting on their thumbs. — Steve Wynn

Stagnation is death. With love, accept and welcome changes. — Debasish Mridha

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. — Socrates

So your High Priest and Sacerdote propose to kill Death." Edroc — Christie Maurer

Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death. Therefore the true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy, not by adding to it an infinite time, but by taking away the desire for immortality. For there is no reason why the man who is thoroughly assured that there is nothing to fear in death should find anything to fear in life. So, too, he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because the anticipation of it is painful; for that which is no burden when it is present gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or to the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are. — Epicurus

Death is the promise we're all born with, sir. A good
death is better than a poor one. — Michael Moorcock

You can pray and fight at the same time, Corporal. Especially if you learn how before things get rough. It's important to have a philosophy of life ... and of death. — Henry V. O'Neil

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. — Elie Wiesel

what if there was an uncanny moment when all the birds were grounded from Cape Town to Juneau, and everywhere between--all feathers frozen in a universal stutter, so quick as to make a snail of light, and even Stephen Hawking's mind would miss it? — Kristen Henderson

Hope is the thread between life and death,
As long as hope is alive we take breath. — Debasish Mridha

The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it ... Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily. — Socrates

Our faith is stronger than death, our philosophy is firmer than flesh, and the spread of the Kingdom of God upon the earth is more sublime and more compelling. — Dorothy Day

He tried to disguise how tired and ill he was, how depressing the thought of death was to him and how he spent his days and nights thinking up schemes of living beyond what the prognosis said. His hope, if not his heart, would find a way. — Noorilhuda

The love and war in the previous injunctions are of the nature of sport, where one respects, and learns from the opponent, but never interferes with him, outside the actual game. To seek to dominate or influence another is to seek to deform or destroy him; and he is a necessary part of one's own Universe, that is, of one's self. — Aleister Crowley

Sleeping is terrifying.
When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself - voluntarily - and you're trustingly assuming you'll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again.
Usually you do.
But sometimes you don't.
It's that uncertainty, more than anything, which kills me. That I might not wake up, and wouldn't know it.
That I could be dead, dreaming I'm alive. — Nenia Campbell

Born free. Taxed to death. — Christopher Titus

Live to revel in just another twilight. Life may sink and disappear along with the sunset never to rise again — Munia Khan

When, at last, I ceased to be myself, I came to be. — Kamand Kojouri

What we gain in the world, we lose in the world, forgotten in death. We must rather fancy what we brought into the world, for therein lives our story, our legend. — Palle Oswald

Even the death won't be an end of our dreams.Take your dreams to the tomb — Mohammed Sekouty

We always emerge from the death of a loved one like a phoenix arising from its funeral pyre. — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

There is only one religion - it is a way a man dies. — James Runcie

The only time that exists in life is now. — Ken Poirot

Reincarnation doesn't help you if in your next incarnation you still don't know who you are.
Eckhart Tolle -The Power of Now — Julie Kelly

Death is the defined destination at the end of our life where we transform and transcend ourselves for eternal life. — Debasish Mridha