Inspirational Death Quotes & Sayings

It's a bad job," he said, when I had done; "but the sun sets every day, and people die every minute, and we mustn't be scared by the common lot. If we failed to hold our own, because that equal foot at all men's doors was heard knocking somewhere, every object in this world would slip from us. No! Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race! — Charles Dickens

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

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living. — Alice Sebold

The wheel turns. Blue above, green below, we wander a long way, but love is what the cup of our soul contains when we leave the world and the flesh. — Louise Murphy

So many people die with their dreams in their hands. — Alex Rogers

Everything is only a transition — Lailah Gifty Akita

In Life ... Death smiles at everyone. The strongest will always smile back. — Timothy Pina

Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. Death is the opposite of birth. — Eckhart Tolle

The Working Song
by Breton Braley

Oh, we're sick to death of the style of song
That's only a sort of a simpering song,
A kissy song and a sissy song
Or a weepy, creepy, whimpering song.
So give us a lift of a lusty song,
A boisterous, bubbling, boiling song,
Or a smashing song and a dashing song,
Oh, give us the tang of a toiling song,
The chanty loud of the working crowd,
The thunderous thrall of a toiling song!

Ay, sing us a joyous daring song,
Not a moaning, groaning, fretting song,
But a ringing song, and a swinging song,
A rigorous, vigorous, sweating song.
We have had enough of the gypsy song,
Which is only a lazy, shirking song,
So toughen your throat to a rougher note
And give us the tune of a working song,
A tune of strife and the joy of life,
The beat and throb of a working song! — Berton Braley

One day when I die, I will take your tears in me; as provision for my long journey to the gods. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

[ ... ] endless action and reaction. Those beautifully rounded pebbles which you gather on the sand and which you hold in your hand and marvel at their exceeding smoothness, were chiseled into their varies and graceful forms by the ceaseless action of countless waves. Nature is herself a great worker and never tolerates, without certain rebuke, any contradiction to her wise example. Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death. — Frederick Douglass

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. — Charles Darwin

Don't run away from the world. The world is God. Don't run towards the world. God is the void. Don't be afraid of the complexities of this life, nor the stark simplicity of death. — Frederick Lenz

In a clear voice, Mrs. Ross said, "This may be where we mark Liam's time with us, but I don't want you to think this is where you have to come to think about Liam." She held the vase close to her chest. "Think about him always." Her mouth puckered. "Anywhere. — Jessica Knoll

That night in bed I was thinking about the way creeks and streams operate. They start off little, gurgling and bubbling and jumping over rocks and stuff, full of energy, going all over the place. Then they get older and bigger, become rivers, take a more definite course, stick to their path, know where they're going, get slower and wider. And eventually they reach the ocean and become part of this vast mysterious world of water that stretches away forever.
Yep, just like people. — John Marsden

It's a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructable in our wake, and at the same time, are drawn to things that kill: whiskey and cigarette, unprotected sex and deep fried burritos.
It's true that you can get away with drinking and smoking and sunbathing when you're in your teens and twenties, and it's true that rock stars are free to die at twenty-nine, but a lit star needs a long life. — Ariel Gore

The earth will never be the same again
Rock, water, tree, iron, share this greif
As distant stars participate in the pain.
A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf,
A dolphin death, O this particular loss
A Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried
If this small one was tossed away as dross,
The very galaxies would have lied.
How shall we sing our love's song now
In this strange land where all are born to die?
Each tree and leaf and star show how
The universe is part of this one cry,
Every life is noted and is cherished,
and nothing loved is ever lost or perished. — Madeleine L'Engle

What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? — Jess Walter

Believe that you are someone worth saving. — Slade Combs

She wondered If I had woken up, would I have smelled his sadness, his desperation, and his detachment?
His death, her breath.
He told her once, she remembers, these two words have no other rhyme but each other.
If she could go back, she thinks
She would open her eyes, instead of her heart. — Rachel Thompson

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

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

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism.
Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return. — Alistair Urquhart

Sir, your baseball career may be over. You need to find a new profession. Gatewood answered, I've heard that before. (He had always come back. He would prove them wrong again.) (From Love and Death at the Encierro) — Hal Graff

I might face death any minute now! But I should try not to put myself in harms' way as long as I can live. Of course it is not important if I die, because this is going to happen anyway. I know my purpose, my purpose is: How will my life or death impact the lives of others? — Samad Behrangi

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

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

We all leave something behind us. A bird in flight will lose a snow-white feather, and flowers in the hedgerows will drop their petals. And people? We leave memories. Footprints in the dust and fingerprints on everything we've touched, warmth in every hand we've held. We become stories that are spoken of, for always. And in this way, we carry on. — Susan E. Fletcher

Do you know anyone who would be willing to die to save those five-thousand serial killers?"
"No. Everyone I know is too smart for that!"
"Yet Someone did die to save all of the serial killers, and all of the old women, and all of the soldiers, and all of the babies that the world has ever known. That one is Jesus Christ. He died for you and for me. He died for everyone, because in this world our sin has condemned us to death, and the only way that we can be saved was for someone who was Himself without sin to be willing to die in our place."
Molly was silent. Her bright smile had faded, and she felt tears well up in her eyes. — Joyce Swann

I know that a stranger's hand will write to me next, to say that the good and faithful servant has been called at length into the joy of his Lord. And why weep for this? No fear of death will darken St. John's last hour: his mind will be unclouded; his heart will be undaunted; his hope will be sure; his faith steadfast. His own words are a pledge of this: "My Master," he says, "has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly, 'Surely I come quickly!' and hourly I more eagerly respond, 'Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus! — Charlotte Bronte

Death is here and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death - and we are death.
Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,
First our pleasures die - and then
Our hopes, and then our fears - and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust - and we die too.
All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot -
Love itself would, did they not. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Someday you will die. Because you are embodied through and through, at that point you will cease to exist. You will not meet death, because, as the sage says, "Where death is I am not; where I am death is not, so we never meet." When you die there will no longer be any self that is you. Use your self while you have it. — Owen J. Flanagan

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even the enemy — Jessica Dovey

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.
If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds. — Sue Monk Kidd

Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.
It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littre says so and he's never wrong.
And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes.
It's on the other side of life. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

If I Could Read The Last Page of My Life ... — Muhammad Imran Hasan

If all that I know as being alive will end one day, shouldn't I be grateful that I still get to enjoy it now? — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Every breath you take is a step forward toward death.
(Hazrat Ali-As) — Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib

Come, said my Soul
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after death invisibly return,
Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas'd smiles I may keep on,
Ever and ever yet the verses owning - as, first, I here and now,
Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name, — Walt Whitman

George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life. — Elisabeth Elliot

It's not death
that is tragedy. The path that leads to death is. — Osaama Shehzad

We all have same beginning (BIRTH), and we will have same ending (DEATH). So how different can we be? — Mitch Albom

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

No tiredness can destroy hope like death can, as the absolute fatigue of life. — Sorin Cerin

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

Help me to understand, what my grief has prevented me from seeing - within. — Eleesha

What Jesus meant was that whoever is attached to the worldly life and this earthly body will lose them in death. But whoever lets go of attachments to this worldly life and this earthly body and identifies with the permanence or God-consciousness that Jesus represented, will never die. — Rama Swami

We see the death of dreams and hopes, but Jesus has conquered all death! — Jayce O'Neal

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget ... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you. — Katherine Paterson

To obtain life is to add value on other people. Conversely, to obtain death is to subtract value on other people. — Andrew Masuku

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

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

Be strong and kill yourself with the sword of hate and love, then you will not hear the insults and abuse which the enemies of the Church throw at you. Your eyes will not see anything which seems impossible, or the sufferings which may follow, but only the light of faith, and in that light everything is possible; and remember God never lays greater burdens on us than we can bear. — Catherine Of Siena

The day you think you know, your death has happened - because now there will be no wonder and no joy and no surprise. Now you will live a dead life. — Rajneesh

And in that very moment, away behind in some far corner of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed reckoning nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. — J.R.R. Tolkien

It is the acceptance of death that has finally allowed me to choose life. — Elizabeth Lesser

Forth, and fear no darkness! Arise! Arise, Riders of Theoden! Spears shall be shaken,swords shall be splintered! A sword day ... a red day ... ere the sun rises! Ride now! ... Ride now! ... Ride! Ride to ruin and the world's ending! Death! "Death!" Death! "Death!" DEATH! "Death!" Forth, Eorlingas!! — J.R.R. Tolkien

You only get one life. Live it to the fullest. All your miseries will be forgiven when you will be dead. — Santosh Kalwar

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live. — Marcus Aurelius

That's the thing about fear. Death will kill you once, but fear kills you over and over and over, if you let it. — Marcus Allen

The sure path can only lead to death. — C. G. Jung

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

Don't try to change the world; just change yourself. Why? Because the whole world is only relative to the eyes that are looking at it. Your world actually only exists for as long as you exist and with the death of you, includes the death of your world. Therefore, if there is no peace in your heart; you will find no peace in this world, if there is no happiness in your life; you will find no happiness anywhere around you, if you have no love in your heart; you will not find love anywhere and if you do not fly around freely inside your own soul like a bird with perfectly formed wings; then there will never be any freedom for you regardless if you are on a mountaintop removed from all attachments to all of mankind! Even the mountaintop cannot give you freedom if it is not already flying around there inside your own soul! So I say, change yourself. Not the world. — C. JoyBell C.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny - if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image - tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes. — Marshall McLuhan

In every person there is a soul, In every soul there is intelligence, In every intelligence there is thought, In every thought there is either good or evil, In every evil there is death, In every good there is life, In every life there is God. — Stephen R. Lawhead

In heaven, there is no judgment, but rather an opportunity to examine our lives-who we touched, the choices we made, and the consequences of those choices.
-Blue Man — Mitch Albom

Man is born for uprightness. If a man lose his uprightness and yet live, his escape from death is mere good fortune. — Confucius

Where were the stars now, whose progress his mother had followed so religiously? Where was the God that she sometimes turned to in her weakest moments? He remembered gazing at the sky in wonder as a child. That was where they told him the dead went. They became stars in the night sky, an insurmountable distance away. — Shitij Sharma

In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled eggs to eat. Life is essentially trivial. You either decide you will take the trite business of life and give yourself the option of doing something really cool, or you decide you will opt for the Grand Epic of eating disorders and dedicate your life to being seriously trivial. — Marya Hornbacher

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

A critical point: Is an inter-phase between crisis and normalcy, life and death, danger and safety, failure and success — Ikechukwu Joseph

I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is. — Everett Ruess

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

It is like the man who closes his eyes to the sun and then finds himself walking over the edge of a cliff. If the man is too foolish to use the gift of light given to him, how can the sun be blamed for his death? — Katie Beitz

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die. — Michel Houellebecq

And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and
can be none in the future,
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to
beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are
compact,
And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each
as profound as any. — Walt Whitman

The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary with age, enfeebled, dry. So more the things remain the same, the more they change after all. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back though the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come out of the rain. — John Knowles

Death is the only limit to the road you travel. — Roger Zelazny

Only the virtuous can count on life, the pursuer of evil can only ever count on death. — Travis Berketa

He rode death's horse by the tips of his fingers and the tips of his toes. — Isaac Hooke

When everything looks the same on the outside, yet everything has changed on the inside, we break. We break in half.
This is the duality of loss. — Christina Rasmussen

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

Do dogs understand death? Do they have souls? Do they go to heaven? I have alway believed so, but this [event] confirmed that all of God's creatures , humans and animals, have a soul and that we will all be reunited in heaven. My pastor once told me, "If there are no dogs in heaven, I don't want to go." I agree. — Glenwood McNabb

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

Do not forsake prayer, for just as the body becomes weak when it is deprived of food, so also the soul when it is deprived of prayer draws nigh to weakness and noetic death. — Gennadius Of Constantinople

Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal. — Eckhart Tolle

She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it's what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted. — Cecelia Ahern

Nothing significant in the kingdom of God happens unless death occurs. — Mary E. DeMuth

For the person who is grounded in the timeless truth of the universe, there is no life and no death. He or she can experience eternal joy without being limited by the definitions of good and evil. The essence of Oneness always exists within us. — Ilchi Lee

This isn't some kind of inspirational story. Some scrappy, ragtag underdog tale, some pugilistic match where we're the goodhearted gladiator who brings down the oppressive regime that put him in the arena. They get to have that narrative. We are the ones who enslaved whole worlds full of alien inhabitants. We are the ones who built something called a Death Star under the leadership of a decrepit old goblin who believed in the 'dark side' of some ancient, insane religion. — Chuck Wendig

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

Dead and still in the world was worse than dead and in the ground. Dead in the ground at least gave you the hope of heaven. — Ron Rash

Be like the sun for grace and mercy. Be like the night to cover others' faults. Be like running water for generosity. Be like death for rage and anger. Be like the Earth for modesty. Appear as you are. Be as you appear. — Rumi

Sometimes things go wrong. You need to accept that. You need to know that you will be okay. You're amazing. You can have an amazing life if you choose to live it. — Trish Marie Dawson

I cannot begin to say where this belief in Prophecy comes from. The future surely holds the same for us all and that is to return to the Goddess in death. What matters most is what we do while we are here! May the Goddess grant the Gryffin wisdom as they pursue their Destiny. By bringing them to contemplate their actions, she might teach them that happiness and fulfillment are concerns of the present as well as the future. — S.J. Faerlind

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

Mediocrity is Death. — Suleman Abdullah

Flip a coin. Life or death. Heads or tails. You never know. — Laurie Nadel

Science ask facts and religion ask faith, humans are confused between life and death. — Santosh Kalwar