Quotes About Death

Whoever digs at verse must renounce all idols; he has to break with everything. He cannot have truth for his horizon, or the future as his element, for he has no right to hope. He has, on the contrary, to despair. Whoever delves into verse dies; he encounters his death as an abyss.

What does it remember? Itself, death as memory. An immense memory in which one dies. First to forget. To remember only where one remembers nothing. To forget: to remember everything as though by way of forgetting. There is a profoundly forgotten point from which every memory radiates. Everything is exalted in memory from something which is forgotten, an infinitesimal detail, a minuscule fissure into which it passes in its entirety.

Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last - possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.

I feel myself dead – no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead.

As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be a man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death but the impossibility of dying.

more or less in keeping with the intuition, common to the greater part of men, that death is a falling into a dark and immense silence, into an indefinite unconsciousness.

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing.

Evit?m s? ne gândim la moarte pân? când nu mai avem for?a, n-a? spune, de a gândi, ci chiar de a respira.

A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

It is a thing that knows no limit, and before it all men are equal; and the silence of king or slave, in presence of death, or grief, or love, reveals the same features, hides beneath its impenetrable mantle the self-same treasure. For this is the essential silence of our soul, our most inviolable sanctuary, and its secret can never be lost;

It is not the arrival of death, but the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death, but life that we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it is life that wrongfully resists death.

Death has come and atoned for all. I have no grievance against the soul of the man before me. Instinctively do I recognise that it soars high above the gravest faults and the cruellest wrongs (and how admirable and full of significance is this instinct!). If there linger still a regret within me, it is not that I am unable to inflict suffering in my turn, but it is perhaps that my love was not great enough and that my forgiveness has come too late. …

I have lost, within these last few days, a little bull-dog. He had just completed the sixth month of his brief existence. He had no history. His intelligent eyes opened to look out upon the world, to love mankind, then closed again on the cruel secrets of death.

Of what avail are my loftiest thoughts if I have ceased to exist?" there are some will ask; to whom others, it may be, will answer, "What becomes of myself if all that I love in my heart and my spirit must die, that my life may be saved?" And are not almost all the morals, and heroism, and virtue of man summed up in that single choice?

Death descends upon us to take away a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone.

She was born without reason … to die; and she dies without reason….

Do we know what it is that dies in our dead, or even if anything dies? Whatever our religious faith may be, there is at any rate one place where they cannot die. That place is within ourselves; and, if this unhappy mother went beyond the truth, she was yet nearer to it than those despairing ones who nourish the mournful certainty that nothing survives of those whom they loved. She felt too keenly what we do not feel keenly enough.

The true termary dialectic does not realize the synthesis, not even in the future...realization...would be death...The dialectic requires permanent revolution, that is, the self-contestimg of power, which, therefore, should not be considered as absolute

With the cogito begins the struggle between consciousnesses in which, as Hegel says, each one seeks the death of the other. For this battle to even begin, for each consciousness to even suspect the external presences that it negates, they must have a common ground and they must remember their peaceful coexistence in the world of childhood.

The complete man, the man who does not dream, who can die well because he has lived well, and who can love his life because he envisages his death is, like the myth of the Androgyne, the symbol of what we lack.

There is an atheism in Christianity, religion of God made man, where Christ dies, abandoned by God.

The distinctions of fine art bore me to death.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy ' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.