The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

You don’t see too many atheists on the deathbed. They all start cramming then.

All diseases run into one, old age.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

Dying is a wild night and a new road.

The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.

Mortality is very different when you’re 20 to when you’re 50.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I’m referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

It is natural to die as to be born.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

I’m not resigned, but I’m realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it’s a certainty you’ll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it’s an awful process.

When anyone has the power to destroy the whole human race in a matter of hours, it becomes a moral issue. The church must speak out.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

My gold, my money couldn’t stop cancer from appearing on my body. If they can’t save me, then I don’t need them.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for – scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.