Death

"For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar."

"The night comes on that knows not morn, When I shall cease to be all alone, To live forgotten, and love forlorn."

"Dead men bite not."

"τάχ᾽ αὔριον ἔσσετ᾽ ἄμεινον ἐλπίδες ἐν ζωοῖσιν, ἀνέλπιστοι δὲ θανόντες"

"Do not go gentle into that good night."

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

"Since every day a little of our life is taken from us—since we are dying every day—the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely completes the death process."

"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" - and find that there is no death. p. 34"

"Approaching death and death itself, the dissolution of the physical form, is always a great opportunity for spiritual realization. This opportunity is tragically missed most of the time, since we live in a culture that is almost totally ignorant of death, as it is almost totally ignorant of anything that truly matters. Every portal is a portal of death, the death of the false self. When you go through it, you cease to derive your identity from your psychological, mind-made form. You then realize that death is an illusion, just as your identification with form was an illusion. The end of illusion - that's all that death is. It is painful only as long as you cling to illusion. p. 92"

"Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?"

"The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others."

"The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing room defusing an unpleasant odor) and this was done by that very decorum which he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position"

"He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself—all that for which he had lived—and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death."

"I believe if I should die, And you should kiss my eyelids where I lie Cold, dead, and dumb to all the world contains, The folded orbs would open at thy breath, And from its exile in the Isles of Death Life would come gladly back along my veins."

"“Death is never dignified.” O’Doull spoke with a doctor’s certainty. “Never. Dignity in death is something we invent afterwards to make the living feel better.”"

"Say the report is exaggerated."

"Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death."

"If a man despises the applause of the crowd of today, it is because he seeks to survive in renewed minorities for generations. "Posterity is an accumulation of minorities," said Gounod. He wishes to prolong himself in time rather than in space. The crowd soon overthrows its own idols and the statue lies broken at the foot of the pedestal without anyone heeding it; but those who win the hearts of the elect will long be the objects of a fervent worship in some shrine, small and secluded no doubt, but capable of preserving them from the flood of oblivion."

"Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus."

": The supreme day has come and the inevitable hour."

": I have lived, and I have run the course which fortune allotted me; and now my shade shall descend illustrious to the grave."

"Irreameabilis unda."

"C'est demain, ma belle amie, que je fais le saut perilleux."

": It is today, my dear, that I take a perilous leap."

": It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

"But God, who is able to prevail, wrestled with him, as the angel did with Jacob, and marked him; marked him for his own."

"Softly his fainting head he lay Upon his Maker's breast; His Maker kiss'd his soul away, And laid his flesh to rest."

"The tall, the wise, the reverend head, Must lie as low as ours."

"One may live as a conqueror, a king, or a magistrate; but he must die as a man."

"Like Moses to thyself convey, And kiss my raptur'd soul away."

"Mysterious Night! When our first parent knew Thee from report Divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus, with the host of heaven came; And lo! creation widened in man's view. Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O sun? or who could find, While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed, That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind? Why do we then shun death with anxious strife? If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"

"O, I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as day cannot, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death."

"Nothing can happen more beautiful than death."

"How beautiful it is for a man to die Upon the walls of Zion! to be called Like a watch-worn and weary sentinel, To put his armour off, and rest in heaven!"

"I don't wanna die But I ain't keen on living either"

"But he lay like a warrior taking his rest, With his martial cloak around him."

"If I had thought thou couldst have died I might not weep for thee; But I forgot, when by thy side, That thou couldst mortal be; It never through my mind had passed, That time would e'er be o'er When I on thee should look my last, And thou shouldst smile no more!"

"People don't die that easily, really. ...As long as they've got something worth living for."

"Insatiate archer! could not one suffice? Thy shaft flew thrice; and thrice my peace was slain!"

"The chamber where the good man meets his fate Is privileged beyond the common walk Of virtuous life, quite in the verge of heaven."

"A death-bed's a detector of the heart."

"The knell, the shroud, the mattock and the grave, The deep, damp vault, the darkness, and the worm."

"And feels a thousand deaths, in fearing one."

"Early, bright, transient, chaste, as morning dew She sparkled, was exhal'd, and went to heaven."

"Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow."

"He is the Angel of Death. Life lasts long, save for him; populations would rise up like tidal waves and inundate worlds, save for him; criminals would require trials and sentencing, save for him; and of course history might reflect unnecessary twisting and turnings, save for the Angel of Death."

"While on a journey, Chuang Tzu found a skull, dry and parched. With sorrow he questioned and lamented the end to all things. When he finished speaking, he dragged the skull over, and using it as a pillow, lay down to sleep. In the night, the skull came to his dreams and said, "You are a fool to rejoice in the entanglements of life." Chuang Tzu couldn't believe this and asked "If I could return you to your life, you would want that, wouldn't you?" Stunned by Chuang Tzu's foolishness the skull replied, "How do you know that it is bad to be dead?""

"The grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail; because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets."

": What new thing then is it for a man to die, whose whole life is nothing else but a journey to death?"