Quotes About Death

What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death.

But old age, to begin with, has something in common with death. Some face it with indifference, not because they have more courage than others, but because they have less imagination.

The resurrection at our awakening-after that beneficent attack of mental alienation which is sleep-must after all be similar to what occurs when we recall a name, a line, a refrain that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.

Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, and how richly we should have enjoyed the life of pleasure, the travels in unknown lands, which are about to be snatched from us! And no sooner is the danger past than we resume once more the same dull life in which none of those delights existed for us.

He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter.

For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.

The suppression of suffering? Can I really have believed it, have believed that death merely strikes out what exists, and leaves everything else in its place, that it removes the pain from the heart of him for whom the other's existence has ceased to be anything but a source of pain, that it removes the pain and puts nothing in its place? The suppression of pain!

His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family apartment. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905.

Omul viseaz? mult despre rai, sau mai degrab? desper numeroase raiuri succesive, dar toate sunt chiar înainte de a muri ni?te paradisuri pierdute sau în care s-au sim?it pierdu?i.

If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times.

Like so many of his sitters, you had to die an early death, and in your eyes as in theirs, one could see the gloom of forebodings alternating with the soft light of resignation.

We accept so many commitments in regard to life that a time comes when, despairing of ever managing to fulfill them all, we face the graves, we call upon death, "death, which brings help to destinies that have trouble coming true." But while death may exempt us from commitments we have made in regard to life, it cannot exempt us from our commitments to ourselves, especially the most important one: namely, the commitment to live in order to be worthy and deserving.

No doubt, having developed the habit, out of idleness, of each day putting off my work until the day after, I thought that death could be dealt with in the same way.

when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness, which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father.

With ardent sadness he contemplated the scene of his death for a long time, endlessly revising it like a work of art and surrounding it with images of this world, images that still imbued his thoughts, but that, already slipping away from him in his gradual departure, became vague and beautiful.

He now looked death in the face and no longer beheld the scenes that would surround his death. He wanted to remain like that until the end, no longer prey to his lies, which, by trying to bring him a beautiful and wonderful agony, would have added the last straw to his profanations by soiling the mysteries of his death just as it had concealed from him the mysteries of his life.

She insisted, but he would not receive her. He was not even acting out of necessity: she meant nothing to him anymore. Death had rapidly broken the bonds whose enslavement he had been dreading for several weeks. When he tried to think of Oliviane, nothing presented itself to his mind's eye: the eyes of his imagination and of his vanity had closed.

They locked gazes, showing their souls on the edge of their pupils, their melancholy and passionate souls, which death was unable to unite.

They say that Death embellishes its victims and exaggerates their virtues, but in general it is actually life that wronged them. Death, that pious and irreproachable witness, teaches us, in both truth and charity, that in each man there is usually more good than evil.

His strength was restored and, with it, all his desires to live; he went out, began living again, and died a second time for himself.

When our mistress is alive, a great part of the thoughts which form what we call our loves come to us during the hours when she is not by our side. Thus we acquire the habit of having as the object of our meditation an absent person, and one who, even if she remains absent for a few hours only, during those hours is no more than a memory. And so death does not make any great difference.

And in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal, intestinal aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

So heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate, Giving to death, and dying to redeem, So dearly to redeem what hellish hate So easily destroy'd, and still destroys, In those who, when they may, accept not grace.

O fairest of all creation, last and best Of all God's works, creature in whom excelled Whatever can to sight or thought be formed, Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet! How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, Defaced, deflow'red, and now to death devote?