Quotes About Death

The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration is illuminating. (...) Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide.

Deep sleep is when you are asleep but not dreaming. Paradoxical sleep is the sleep in which you dream. So, only paradoxical thought is the thought in which you think. Is there, by analogy, a paradoxical state of death - a deep death and a death with dreams? It is evil that speaks evil: evil can ventriloquize.

Where this living death doesn't exist, life takes its place. Just as the person who loses his shadow becomes the shadow of himself. ('The shadow of himself - that would be a fine title. With the subtitle: 'Memoirs of a double life'.)

This is doubtless the true Oedipal problem for everyone. Not so much to free yourself from the parental triangle as from your virtual double, from that umbilical alter ego who, for each individual, is like a congenital figure of death. It is doubtless with this hidden twin, this virtual twin whom we all carry within us at birth, that we have the greatest difficulty breaking.

But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they [Presidents] were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in order to preserve the blessing of power. But it is lost.

Against the advice of doctors, the governor refuses to allow an incurably ill man to be put out of his misery. This is the other face of capital punishment. One day we shall have to fight for the abolition of the life penalty, as we did in the past for the abolition of the death penalty. Shadows have always preceded us, and they will outlive us. We were dead before we were alive, and we shall be again.

Strictly speaking, we no longer know what to do with them, since, today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. The dead are no longer inflicted on any place or space-time, they can find no resting place; they are thrown into a radical utopia.

In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.

In the same way as the mentally handicapped will be entitled to damages for the fact of being born, every citizen should be able to claim a natural right to intelligence and therefore, in the worst of cases, demand a stupidity support allowance. The most difficult thing will be to assemble the evidence. Death orders matters well, since the very fact of your absence makes the world distinctly less worthy of being lived in.

There is something occulted inside us: our death. But something else is hidden there, lying in wait for us within each of our cells: the forgetting of death. In our cells our immortality lies in wait for us. It's common to speak of the struggle of life against death, but there is an inverse peril. And we must struggle against the possibility that we will not die. (p. 5)

Avoid having power over anyone, unless it be the power of life and death.

L'art ne meurt pas parce qu'il n'y en a plus ; il meurt parce qu'il y en a trop.

In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonour or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.

I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love

Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.

A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: Paul's dying; Paul's going to die' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

La poésie ressemble à la mort. Je connais son Å"il bleu. Il donne la nausée. Cette nausée d'architecte toujours taquinant le vide, voilà le propre du poète. Le poète est, comme nous, invisible aux vivants.

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go.

Raça por mim tão amada, Desta feita morrerás!» Júpiter daí a nada Fez-se menos ferrabrás.

War and death can silence the strongest of men.

All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of two ways: You are dead or I am dead . If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died? And then she occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.

Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.

ship returned from Jamaica — withou' Sammy. He had died of fever in the West Indies.