“Life is but a moment, death also is but another.”
Nobody gets out of here alive, and these quotes do not pretend otherwise. What they offer instead is honesty — about grief, legacy, fear, acceptance, and the strange way that thinking about death can make you more serious about living.
“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”
“Life is but a moment, death also is but another.”
“Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.”
“Kurt and I weren't the closest of friends, but I knew him well enough to be devastated by his death. For such a quiet person, he was so excited about having a child.”
“Call no man happy till he is dead.”
“The knowledge of the realm of death makes it possible for the shaman to move freely back and forth and mediate these journeys for other people.”
“People living deeply have no fear of death.”
“A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.”
“If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.”
“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.”
“War is not the only arena where peace is done to death.”
“Man always dies before he is fully born.”
“Property is unstable, and youth perishes in a moment. Life itself is held in the grinning fangs of Death, Yet men delay to obtain release from the world. Alas, the conduct of mankind is surprising.”
“If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a 'peace conference,' you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.”
“In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.”
“What is the value of sticking a microphone in a man's face right after he has learned of his wife's death?”