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Quotes About Death

Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn't any memory. The power that's established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right.
~ Saul Bellow
History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.
~ Saul Bellow
He looked down through the green transparency to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines. Never still. If his soul could cast a reflection so briljant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him. But that would be too childish. The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry. A vast human action is going on. Death watches. So if you have some happiness, conceal it. And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also.
~ Saul Bellow
Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?
~ Saul Bellow
History, memory – that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death.' For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.
~ Saul Bellow
Što se ti?e njegovog odnosa prema mrtvima, taj je zaista bio vrlo loš. On je doista vjerovao da mrtvima treba prepustiti da pokopaju svoje mrtve. I da je život samo onda život kada se nedvosmisleno shva?a kao umiranje.
~ Saul Bellow
Well, you are a privileged character. You're the only man living whose mother lost her mind and died.
~ Saul Bellow
For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.
~ Saul Bellow
But I wasn't inclined to go out of my way to defer to so many critics. I had a good grasp of reality and of my defects. I permanently kept in mind the approach of Death, who might at any time loom up before you.
~ Saul Bellow
But I'm thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labor camps. Why does the century—I don't know how else to put it—underwrite so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these facts.
~ Saul Bellow
The Dictator must have living crowds and also a crowd of corpses.
~ Saul Bellow
death, how I imagined it, I said that the pictures would stop. Evidently I saw as pictures what Americans refer to as Experience. I wasn't at the moment thinking of the pictures newly available, recently offered by technology—the kind of tour one now might take of one's digestive tract, or of the heart. The heart—only a group of muscles after all. But how tenacious they are, starting to beat in the womb, and going in rhythm for as long as a century.
~ Saul Bellow
The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence - one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer - has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To live in the grave, in one place, how frightful!
~ Saul Bellow
But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.
~ Saul Bellow
Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes.
~ Saul Bellow
Suppose, then, that after the greatest , most passionate vividness and tender glory, oblivion is all were have to expect, the big blank of death. What options present themselves? One option is to train yourself gradually into oblivion so that no great change has taken place when you have died. Another option is to increase the bitterness of life so that death is a desirable release. (In this the rest of mankind will fully collaborate.)
~ Saul Bellow
I imagine, sometimes, that if a film could be made of one's life, every other frame would be death. It goes so fast we're not aware of it. Destruction and resurrection in alternate beats of being, but speed makes it seem continuous. But you see, kid, with ordinary consciousness you can't even begin to know what's happening.
~ Saul Bellow
Since the last question, also the first one, the quesiton of death, offers us the interesting alternatives of disintegrating ourselves by our own wills in proof of our freedom, or the acknowledging that we owe a human life to this waking spell of existence, regardless of the void.
~ Saul Bellow Herzog
La seule chose que nous apprend la mort, (c'est) qu'il est urgent d'aimer
~ Schmitt Éric-Emmanuel
the brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life.
~ Schopenhauer
You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come. T. E. LAWRENCE, IN A LETTER TO HIS MOTHER, 1916
~ Scott Anderson
Each of us faces a choice every moment of every day. When we choose God—his laws, his wills, and his way—we choose life. And when we choose ourselves—our laws, our wills, our way—we choose death.
~ Scott Hahn
We would have a poor idea of marriage and of human affection if we were to think that love and joy come to an end when faced with such difficulties. It is precisely then that our true sentiments come to the surface. Then the tenderness of a person's gift of himself takes root and shows itself in a true and profound affection that is stronger than death.
~ Scott Hahn
Sleep is a little slice of death.
~ Scott Westerfeld