“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.”
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 don't think I would want the responsibility for enforcing the death penalties. There's always the inevitable question of whether someone you gave the order to execute might truly have been innocent.”
“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.”
“In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.”
“Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man! Forced servitude, with the risk of death and serious injury as a price to live free, makes no sense.”
“Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.”
“Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.”
“There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.”
“If death is in the room, it's pretty interesting. But I would also say that I'm interested in getting myself to believe that it's going to happen to me. I'm interested in it, because if you're not, you're nuts. It's really de facto what we're here to find out about.”
“True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.”
“I really enjoy theater. I just went to see 'Death of a Salesman,' and it knocked me on my ass.”
“Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.”
“You've gotta know what death is to know life!”
“But I was very, very lucky, and it was a wake up call as far as motorbikes are concerned. I never flirted with death on the bike, but now I'm totally convinced they're death machines.”
“For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.”
“It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.”
“The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual's way of being in the world.”