Quotes About Death

When near his death, being asked by the tribune for the watchword, he said, Go to the rising sun, for I am setting.

Para que guarde la muerte en actitud placida, no viendo en ella otra cosa que la disolución de los elementos de que consta todo ser viviente. Si no hay nada temible para los mismos elementos en esta transformación incesante de uno en otro ¿por que temer a la transformación y disolución de todas las cosas? Esto es conforme a la naturaleza y nada es malo en cuanto a ella se acomoda

We do not think that Jesus thought that the purpose of his life, his vocation, was his death. His purpose was what he was doing as a healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator. His death was the consequence of what he was doing, but not his purpose.

the domination system, understood as something much larger than the Roman governor and the temple aristocracy, is responsible for the death of Jesus. In words attributed to Paul, God through Jesus "disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in the cross."17 The domination system killed Jesus and thereby disclosed its moral bankruptcy and ultimate defeat.

Why did it happen? Why did Jesus' life end this way? For centuries, Christians have seen Jesus' death as the very purpose of his life. It was salvific; that is, it had saving significance and makes our salvation possible.

Older than the gospels themselves, this understanding of Jesus' death is central to the letters of Paul. It is also part of Paul's summary of the tradition he received when he became a follower of Jesus: "For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures."4

In short, I could accept that Jesus saw his own death the way that Tom suggests only if there were very strong historical evidence for it. I find it more historically persuasive, and religiously compelling, to see the purposeful understanding of Jesus' death as post-Easter interpretations, and as history metaphorized, not history remembered.

The bottom line is it is going to get us all; we're all going to die"—then your response is likely to be one of self-protection in various ways. You will try to find security against the devouring power that will consume us all.

If they mean, "Do you think Jesus saw his own death as a sacrifice for sin?" or "Do you think that God can forgive sins only because of Jesus' sacrifice?," my answer is no. But if they mean, "Is the statement a powerfully true metaphor of the grace of God?," then my answer is yes. Let me explain.

The slave ships are ghost ships still sailing around the edges of our modern consciousness. Their legacy in the present is discrimination, deep poverty, structural inequality, and premature death.

Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage.

For the whole life of a philosopher is, as the same philosopher says, a meditation on death.

Did not he, then, who, if he had died at that time, would have died in all his glory, owe all the great and terrible misfortunes into which he subsequently fell to the prolongation of his life at that time?

The process, indeed, of nature is this: that just in the same manner as our birth was the beginning of things with us, so death will be the end; and as we were noways concerned with anything before we were born, so neither shall we be after we are dead. And

As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age; first it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.

non deterret sapientem mors.

I worked with Diodotus the Stoic, who made his residence in my house, and after a life of long intimacy died there only a short time ago.

Turpis autem fuga mortis omni est morte pejor.

By this time I was thoroughly terrified, not so much fearing death as the treachery of my own kind.

A wise man's life is all one preparation for death.

Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be...

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

No one wants to die," said Becka. "But some people don't want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.