Martyrs Death Quotes & Sayings

If Jesus' death is different, it is not because he suffered more than other martyrs, either physically or spiritually, nor because his death was lonelier, or more humiliating, or more gruesome (despite Mel Gibson's heroic attempt to render it so). This common idea is quite mistaken. Such considerations are not what make Jesus' death unique. The uniqueness of his death is found in its meaning — James Warren

Prison, blood, death, create enthusiasts and martyrs, and bring forth courage and desperate resolution. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Be dead in life, and you will not live in death. Let your soul die strenuously, and not live in weakness. Not only those who suffer death for the sake of faith in Christ are martyrs; but also those who die because of their observance of His commandments. — Isaac Of Nineveh

I want men who will believe in Me, even when I do not protect them; I will not open the prison doors where My brethren are locked; I will not stay the murderous Red sickle or the imperial lions of Rome, I will not halt the Red hammer that batters down My tabernacle doors; I want My missionaries and martyrs to love Me in prison and death as I loved them in My own suffering. I never worked any miracles to save Myself! I will work few miracles even for My saints. Begone, Satan! Thou shalt not tempt the Lord, thy God. — Fulton J. Sheen

Martyrs, you see, are like bees. Their only power comes in death. How many of you would sacrifice yourself not to kill, but merely hurt your enemy? — Pierce Brown

Days will prove that the assassination policy will not finish the Hamas. Hamas leaders wish to be martyrs and are not scared of death. Jihad will continue and the resistance will continue until we have victory, or we will be martyrs. — Ahmed Yassin

Consider the pains which martyrs have endured, and think how even now many people are bearing afflictions beyond all measure greater than yours, and say, "Of a truth my trouble is comfort, my torments are but roses as compared to those whose life is a continual death, without solace, or aid or consolation, borne down with a weight of grief tenfold greater than mine." — Saint Francis De Sales

Red and white, the Tudor rose that symbolized the union between the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York, blood and snow, passion and purity, fire and ice, hell and heaven, sinner and saint, conquest and surrender, whore and virgin, the red dazzle of rubies and the nacreous lustrous shimmer of pearls, innocence born from a bloody womb, the blood is the life, the cold white marble of death - a tomb effigy; red roses for the blood of martyrs. — Brandy Purdy

I really have no experience," he began. "No one has any experience," said the other, "of the Battle of Armageddon." "But I am really unfit - " "You are willing, that is enough," said the unknown. "Well, really," said Syme, "I don't know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test." "I do," said the other - "martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day. — G.K. Chesterton

If it will be an intolerable thing to suffer the heat of fire for a year or a day, or an hour, what will it be to suffer ten thousand times more for ever? What if thou wert to suffer Lawrence 's death, to be roasted upon a gridiron; or to be scraped or pricked to death as other martyrs were; or if thou wert to feed upon toads for a year together? If thou couldst not endure such things as these, how wilt thou endure the eternal flames ? — Richard Baxter

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. — Viktor E. Frankl

Not all of us are called to die a martyr's death, but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had. — Richard Wurmbrand

There was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice; that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being puts one in the role of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham, entirely without reproach; yet, for the same master, he would have gladly gone to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifice of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim. — Robert Leckie

I do not fear death, for death transforms visionaries into martyrs; converts noble ideas into powerful movements. — Dan Brown

Surely martyrs, irrespective of the special phase of the divine idea for which they gladly give up their bodies to torture and to death, are the truest heroes of history. — Katharine Lee Bates

People who've come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity - we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes, our martyrs. We have a special relationship with death. The stories people tell me are full of jarring terms: "shoot," "execute," "liquidate," "eliminate," or typically Soviet varieties of disappearance such as "arrest," "ten years without the right of correspondence,"*2 and "emigration." How — Svetlana Alexievich

So there are to be no obsequies. There is to be no mention of that which was to have conquered the world, and after the world, death. Not one of all these martyrs nailed to every tree in the western hemisphere will find favour in the editor's measuring eye. On the amusement page, to fill up space, one inch and a half, perhaps, of those who were forced to die. Butter is up ten cents. The human being is down. — Elizabeth Smart

Death was sweetened for the martyrs by the promise of 72 virgins waiting in paradise. She had researched the 72 virgins. The number wasn't actually in the Quran but in the Hadith 2687, collected in the Book of Sunan. The Quran, in Sura 56, was vague on the point. And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls ... A new analysis translated houris from the Aramaic dialect Syriac as "white raisins", which put everything in a very different light. — Leslie Cockburn

Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of the their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful. — Viktor E. Frankl

As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next. — Ibn Warraq

Those of us with the courage to open ourselves to that much love and not fear it - who can give joy to a dying child until the very end without withdrawing to save ourselves - those are our saints. It is not the martyrs. It is never the martyrs. — Derek Miller

His story is colored by the murder of a brother, the rape of a sister, the betrayal of a friend, the pounding of nails into flesh and bone, and the darkening of the sky. A world of what-ifs and could-have-beens, peopled by has-beens and might-have-beens. It is a world soaked in fear and drenched by the blood of a million martyrs. A world of men burned at the stake and babes slaughtered at their mother's breasts. A dark history with pain oozing into all its hidden corners. At the center of history is a death. Christ's death, the decisive point of history. Christianity is perhaps the most morbid religion of the world. Perpetually meditating upon death with little crosses hung around their necks, Christian disciples sing their way to martyrdom. Anticipating death and calling it gain, Christians are evangelists of the grotesque. The very hope of the Gospel rests directly upon our ability to imagine a world in which suffering serves as the soil from which resurrection springs. — Ben Palpant

The faithful clamoured to be buried alongside the martyrs, as close as possible to the venerable remains, a custom which, in anthropological terms, recalls Neolithic beliefs that certain human remains possessed supernatural properties. It was believed that canonized saints did not rot, like lesser mortals, but that their corpses were miraculously preserved and emanated an odour of sanctity, a sweet, floral smell, for years after death. In forensic terms, such preservation is likely to be a result of natural mummification in hot, dry conditions. — Catharine Arnold

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as his cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day. And as even his birth is his death, so every action and passage that manifests Christ to us is his birth, for Epiphany is manifestation. — John Donne

Martyrs of a sort they were, these children, along with the town drunk, in his basketball sneakers and buttonless overcoat, draining blackberry brandy from a paper bag as he sat on his bench in Kazmierczak Square, risking nightly death by exposure; martyrs too of a sort were the men and women hastening to adulterous trysts, risking disgrace and divorce for their fix of motel love - all sacrificing the outer world to the inner, proclaiming with this priority that everything solid-seeming and substantial is in fact a dream, of less account than a merciful rush of feeling. — John Updike

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

It's an insidious idea, this notion that there is life after death. The promise of a reward in the afterlife has been used as an excuse to deny help to the poor, helpless and oppressed; to explain away human misery rather than deal with it. It is an idea that is used to encourage young men and women to kill themselves, and others, so that they can become martyrs. It allows victims of injustice to be told not to worry because justice will be done in the afterlife. It depresses me to think that so many people on the planet live their lives with this notion. Can we truly fulfill our potential as a species as long as we hold on to, and encourage, the perpetuation of the lie of life after death? — Alom Shaha

The saints must be honored as friends of Christ and children and heirs of God. Let us carefully observe the manner of life of all the apostles, martyrs, ascetics, and just men who announced the coming of the Lord. And let us emulate their faith, charity, hope, zeal, life, patience under suffering, and perseverance unto death so that we may also share their crowns of glory. — John Of Damascus

Other men have said, "If I could only live, I would establish and perpetuate an empire." This Christ of Galilee says, "My death shall do it." Other martyrs have died in simple fidelity to truth. This martyr dies that He may make His truth mighty over all hearts. He was a man; but was He only a man? — Herrick Johnson

The girl did not even know the video would be leaked. Yet it is her willingness to suffer hardship that gave her power. Martyrs, you see, are like bees. Their only power comes in death. How many of you would sacrifice yourself to not kill, but merely hurt your enemy? Not one of you, I wager."

I taste blood in my mouth. I have the knifeRing Dancer gave me. But I breathe the fury down. I am no martyr. I am not vengeance. I am Eo's dream. Still, doing nothing while her murderer gloats feels like a betrayal.

"In time you will receive your Scars from my sword," Augustus closes. "But first you must earn them. — Pierce Brown

We are not martyrs or heroes, nor do we wish to be. We do not want to die. We are young, too young, for death. We long to see our two young sons, Michael and Robert, grown to full
manhood...We desire some day to be restored to a society where we can contribute
our energies toward building a world where all shall have peace, bread and roses.
Yes, we wish to live, but in the simple dignity that clothes only those who have been
honest with themselves and their fellow men. — Ethel Rosenberg

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity.
Yet many others search their entire lives for something - or someone - worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger. — Ilsa J. Bick

We don't know why God chose to deliver Peter from death and James through death. The text doesn't say. — K. Howard Joslin

What good are the works of all men, and all the pains of the martyrs, in comparison with the pains of the Son of God dying on the Cross, so that there was not a drop of His precious blood, but it was all shed for your sins. If you could properly evaluate this incomparable price, you would throw all your ceremonies, vows, works, and merits into the ash can. What awful presumption to imagine that there is any work good enough to pacify God, when to pacify God required the invaluable price of the death and blood of His own and only Son? — Martin Luther

It is also the irrational instinct of religionism, the vague yearning for something to worship - a reflection or shadow of the true devotional principle - which prompts men to project a subjective image of the lower, personal mind, and to endow it with human attributes, and then to claim to receive "revelations" from it; and this - the image of the Beast, or unspiritual mind, - is their anthropomorphic God, a fabulous monster the worship of which has ever prompted men to fanaticism and persecution, and has inflicted untold misery and dread upon the masses of mankind, as well as physical torture and death in hideous forms upon the many martyrs who have refused to bend the knee to this Gorgonean phantom of the beast-mind of man. Truly, where the worshipers of this image of the Beast predominate, the man whose brow and hand are unbranded by this superstition, who neither thinks nor acts in accordance with it, suffers ostracism if not virulent persecution. — James Morgan Pryse

Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed's coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour's death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe - Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise. — Dorothy Dunnett

Their example gives witness to the fact that baptism commits Christians to participate boldly in the spread of the Kingdom of God, cooperating if necessary with the sacrifice of one's own life ... This martyrdom of ordinary life is a particularly important witness in the secularized societies of our time. It is the peaceful battle of love that all Christians, like Paul, have to fight tirelessly; the race to spread the Gospel that commits us until death. May Mary, Queen of Martyrs and Star of Evangelization, help us and assist us in our daily witness. — Pope Benedict XVI