Death Quotes - Page 42

Consciousness after death demonstrates the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body.

The wise man seeks death all his life, and for this reason death is not terrifying to him.

Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.

Everything you cherish Throws you over in the end Thorns will grab your ankles From the gardens that you tend.

Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.

The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it.

Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

Cherry trees will blossom every year; But I'll disappear for good, One of these days.

To be reborn hourly and daily in this life, we need to die — to give of ourselves wholly to the demands of the moment, so that we utterly "disappear." Thoughts of past, present, or future, of life and death, of this world and the next, are transcended in the superabundance of the now. Time and timelessness coalesce: this is the moment of eternity.

In "The Myth of Sisyphus", his most important non-fiction work, Albert Camus suggested that if we believed what most people claim to be the purpose of life, we would feel compelled to commit suicide. If, however, we accept that life has no purpose we would be inclined to soldier on in a cussed, stoical manner like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his rock up a hill only to see it roll down again.

What is death, after all? We leave only mortals behind us.

We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.

Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there; I did not die.

I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Do not fear death, but welcome it, since it too comes from nature. For just as we are young and grow old, and flourish and reach maturity, have teeth and a beard and grey hairs, conceive, become pregnant, and bring forth new life, and all the other natural processes that follow the seasons of our existence, so also do we have death. A thoughtful person will never take death lightly, impatiently, or scornfully, but will wait for it as one of life's natural processes.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

So far as I can see the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages.

God grant that by my persevering labours I may bring a little stone to the frail and ill-assured edifice of our knowledge of those deep mysteries of Life and Death where all our intellects have so lamentably failed.

Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.

One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

The first undeniable reality is that every living thing dies, and the second undeniable reality is that we suffer throughout our lives because we don't understand death. The truth derived from these two points is the importance of clarifying the matter of birth and death. The third undeniable reality is that all of the thoughts and feelings that arise in my head simply arise haphazardly, by chance. And the conclusion we can derive from that is not to hold on to all that comes up in our head. That is what we are doing when we sit zazen.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

Death did not first strike Adam, the first sinful man, nor Cain, the first hypocrite, but Abel, the innocent and righteous. The first soul that met with death, overcame death; the first soul that parted from earth went to heaven. Death argues not displeasure, because he whom God loved best dies first, and the murderer is punished with living.