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

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

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

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

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.

We fear that this moment will end, that we won’t get what we need, that we will lose what we love, or that we will not be safe. Often, our biggest fear is the knowledge that one day our bodies will cease functioning. So even when we are surrounded by all the conditions for happiness, our joy is not complete.

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.

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.

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

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.

I think when you see an aircraft fire, these angry, black puffs of smoke, knowing that one of them could kill you that you – you – you understand the seriousness of the mission. And you understand your own mortality.

Because I believe in God and have faith in God, it doesn’t mean I am immortal. It doesn’t mean I am immune, as has been claimed. I am as scared as anyone of getting hurt, especially driving a Formula One car.

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

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

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

To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

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.

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.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

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.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

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.

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

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

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.

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

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

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

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?

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

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

Wars based on principle are far more destructive… the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

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.

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

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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

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?‘

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

How young can you die of old age?

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

Every time I think that I’m getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.

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

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need, if I die by four o’clock.

John 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.

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.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

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

Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering – an image of death.

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

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.

As a single withered tree, if set aflame, causes a whole forest to burn, so does a rascal son destroy a whole family.

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.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

I’ve looked that old scoundrel death in the eye many times but this time I think he has me on the ropes.

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