Philosophy on death

“We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.”

“Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.”

“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”

“To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.”

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

“Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.”

“All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.”

“I spit on my life. Death in battle would be better for me than that I, defeated, survive.”

“I can affirm that a person who neither eats the flesh of other beings nor wears any part of the bodies of other beings, nor even thinks of eating or wearing these things, is a person who will gain liberation.”

“Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.”

“In a world become blind, I beat the drum of the Deathless.”

“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”

“Best is not to be ... second-best is to die quickly”

“The soul that has died from excess of moisture sinks down to earth; but from the earth comes water, and from water is once more exhaled a soul (fr. 68).”

“Everything is... the death of something else (fr. 64).”

“The death of dogma is the birth of morality.”

“He is dead, and my hatred has died with him.”

“Jupiter: I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? / Aegisteus: Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.”

“I am not at all interested in immortality, only in the taste of tea.”

“Cowardice is impotence worse than violence. The coward desires revenge but being afraid to die, he looks to others… to do the work of defense for him.”

“Complete civil disobedience is a state of peaceful revolution, a refusal to obey every single state-made law.”

“There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.”

“I hold the opinion firmly that Civil Disobedience is the purest type of constitutional agitation. Of course, it becomes degrading and despicable if its civil, i.e. non-violent character is a mere camouflage.”

“Disobedience is a right that belongs to every human being, and it becomes a sacred duty when it springs from civility.”

“The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.”

“Be straightforward. Look at things like a man, like a human being, like a citizen, like a mortal. (Hays translation)”

“Death, like generation, is a secret of Nature.”

“Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you're alive and able—be good. (Hays translation)”

“Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.”

“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”

“The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.”

“Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.”

“It was a great deed to conquer Carthage, but a greater deed to conquer death.”

“You do not know where death awaits you; so be ready for it everywhere.”

“He who does not wish to die cannot have wished to live.”

“Either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or if at all, after death. For then, and not til then, the soul will be in herself alone and without the body.”

“He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world.”

“Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.”

“Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.”

“The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.”

“The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame…”

“And when all the world is overcharged with Inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is Warre, which provideth for every man, by Victory or Death.”