Death

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die. ~~ Bob Dylan

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised. ~~ Ivan Illich

In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight … Not people die but worlds die in them. ~~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile. ~~ Yukio Mishima

Most people die at the last minute; others 20 years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth. ~~ Louis Celine

Death in itself is nothing; but we fear

To be we know not what, we know not where. ~~ John Dryden

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. ~~ J. D. Salinger

The prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one. ~~ Tom Hanks

Death is just a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees. ~~ J. J. Furnas

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies, for the world needs such men more than heaven does. ~~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now. ~~ Joan Baez

The coming together of two laudable movements -- death with dignity and cost containment -- concerns me … Patients have a right to die. But do they have a duty to die? ~~ Mark Siegler

Worry affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system. I have never known a man who died from overwork, but many who died from doubt. ~~ Charles H. Mayo

The unfit die -- the fit both live and thrive. Alas, who say so? They who do survive. ~~ Sarah N. Cleghorn

Hard work never killed anybody, but you never heard of anyone relaxing to death either. ~~ Wall Street Journal

… to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part. ~~ The Book of Common Prayer

We can now prove that large numbers of Americans are dying from sitting on their behinds. ~~ Bruce B. Dan

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death: he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live. ~~ Jean de La Bruyere

Life is unbearable, but death is not so pleasant either. ~~ Russian proverb

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

The difference between death and taxes is that death never gets any worse. ~~ Unattributed

Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down. ~~ Graffiti [London, 1978]

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. ~~ Norman Cousins

Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep,

And yet a third of life is passed in sleep. ~~ Lord Byron

[On his deathbed:] Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuse are for all -- the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved. ~~ Mark Twain

[His last words:]  Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. My advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. ~~ W. Somerset Maugham

The light of the stars that were extinguished ages ago still reaches us. So is it with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personality. ~~ Kahlil Gibran

The only religious way to think of death is as a part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life. ~~ Thomas Mann

To die will be an awfully big adventure. ~~ James M. Barrie

What is play to the cat is death to the mouse. ~~ Danish proverb

Live your own life, for you will die your own death. ~~ Latin proverb

Few politicians die, and none resign. ~~ Thomas Jefferson

It's too late to die young. ~~ US Public Health brochure for those 50 and over

To be born a gentleman is an accident -- to die one is an accomplishment. ~~ Unattributed

Hard work will not kill a man, but it almost scares some men to death. ~~ Unattributed

Ambition and death are alike in this: neither is ever satisfied. ~~ The Bible

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. ~~ George Eliot

Be ever questioning. Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion. You don't go to heaven if you die dumb. Become better informed. Lean from others' mistakes. You could not live long enough to make them all yourself. ~~ Admiral Hyman Rickover

When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death -- ourselves. ~~ Eda LeShan

War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world. ~~ Lyndon Baines Johnson

We … would rather die on our feet than live on our knees. ~~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt

If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time, or die by suicide. ~~ Abraham Lincoln

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck. ~~ George Carlin

It was from an old friend who … thought he was dying. Anyway, he said, Life and death issues don't come along that often, thank God, so don't treat everything like it's life or death. Go easier. ~~ Charles Grodin

Don't cling to fame. You're just borrowing it. It's like money. You're going to die, and somebody else is going to get it. ~~ Sonny Bono

Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love… ~~ Dean Koontz [Fear Nothing]

Although rumors persist to the contrary, there were no deaths while making the movie Ben Hur. ~~ Deane Jordan

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt. ~~ Joseph Heller

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. ~~ Anais Nin

There is something about poverty that smells like death. ~~ Zora Neale Hurston

To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form. ~~ Hermann Hesse

If I die, I forgive you; if I live, we'll see. ~~ Spanish proverb

Many men die at twenty-five and aren't buried until they are seventy-five. ~~ Benjamin Franklin

It may be that we have all lived before and died, and this is hell. ~~ A. L. Prusick

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down. ~~ Woody Allen

Death is nature's way of saying Howdy. ~~ Unattributed

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. ~~ Bertrand Russell

I prefer my oysters fried;

That way I know my oysters died. ~~ Roy G. Blount, Jr.

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live. ~~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

All men should strive to learn before they die

What they are running from, and to, and why. ~~ James Thurber

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death. ~~ Hector Hugh Munro [Saki]

I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened. ~~ Sir Winston Churchill

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by my friends the murderers. ~~ Alphonse Karr

Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself. ~~ Josiah Royce

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. ~~ Madame De Stael

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up. ~~ Wilson Mizner

Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses. ~~ Moliere

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was time when we were not; this gives us no concern -- why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? ~~ William Hazlitt

The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his. ~~ General George S. Patton

If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it. ~~ Alan Watts

In the long run we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility. ~~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Life without a friend is death without a witness. ~~ Spanish proverb

When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it’s health. If everything is simply jake, then you're frightened of death. ~~ J. P. Donleavy

The report of my death was an exaggeration. ~~ Mark Twain

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that. ~~ Bill Shankly

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. ~~ William Shakespeare

More men die of worry than of work, because more men worry than work. ~~ Robert Frost

Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death. ~~ Patrick Henry

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, to one's affections, and one's inner happiness. ~~ George Sand

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end. ~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other. ~~ Francis Bacon

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit. ~~ Norman Mailer

It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune. ~~ Woody Allen

On CBS Radio the news of his [Ed Murrow's] death, reportedly from lung cancer, was followed by a cigarette commercial. ~~ Alexander Kendrick

Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter. ~~ Sir Max Beerbohm

Wouldn't it be weird if the only way people could die was that their heads suddenly exploded without warning? If there was simply no other cause of death? One day you'd be sitting there having a hot chocolate, and suddenly your head would explode. ~~ George Carlin

'Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard, Master Harry -- every man of every nation has done that -- 'tis the living up to it that's difficult. ~~ William Makepeace Thackeray

The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates. ~~ Dave Barry

Cosmic upheaval is not so moving as a little child pondering the death of a sparrow in the corner of a barn. ~~ Thomas Savage

I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass! ~~ Lewis Mumford (see Said Who)

[When asked how he would choose to die:] You never know what's hit you. A gunshot is the perfect way.  ~~ John F. Kennedy

Every time an artist dies, part of the vision of mankind passes with him. ~~ Franklin D. Roosevelt