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

Whether you like it or not, you’re forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don’t fear death, I’m a fatalist. I believe when it’s your time, that’s it. It’s the hand you’re dealt.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

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

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

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

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

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

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

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

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

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

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.

We all know we have a finite period of time. I just feel if I’m going to be alive, I want to be challenged – to be as immortal as possible. The path to that isn’t an easy way, but it’s a rewarding way.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn’t work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.

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

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

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

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

Hence it comes about that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

The same ambition can destroy or save, and make a patriot as it makes a knave.

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.

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.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.

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

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

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

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

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

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.

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

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

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

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

There’s something about death that is comforting. The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to appreciate your life now.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

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.

Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

Death wasn’t part of God’s original plan for humanity, and the Bible calls death an enemy – the last enemy to be destroyed.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Fear of death makes us devoid both of valour and religion. For want of valour is want of religious faith.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

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

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.