Death Quotes - Page 60

When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated, deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered unreasonable, cruel, revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. He had solemnly promised the Jews that he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He had led them to believe that in a little while their troubles would be over, and that they would soon in the land of Canaan, surrounded by their wives and little ones, forget the stripes and tears of Egypt. After promising the poor wanderers again and again that he would lead them in safety to the promised land of joy and plenty, this God, forgetting every promise, said to the wretches in his power:—'Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your carcasses be wasted.' This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death and night faded all the promises of God. Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses were left to rot in the desert, and each one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. I cannot believe these things. They are so cruel and heartless, that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that is equally abhorrent to my head and heart, cannot be accepted as a revelation from God.When we think of the poor Jews, destroyed, murdered, bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, decimated by famine, butchered by each, other, swallowed by the earth, frightened, cursed, starved, deceived, robbed and outraged, how thankful we should be that we are not the chosen people of God. No wonder that they longed for the slavery of Egypt, and remembered with sorrow the unhappy day when they exchanged masters. Compared with Jehovah, Pharaoh was a benefactor, and the tyranny of Egypt was freedom to those who suffered the liberty of God.While reading the Pentateuch, I am filled with indignation, pity and horror. Nothing can be sadder than the history of the starved and frightened wretches who wandered over the desolate crags and sands of wilderness and desert, the prey of famine, sword, and plague. Ignorant and superstitious to the last degree, governed by falsehood, plundered by hypocrisy, they were the sport of priests, and the food of fear. God was their greatest enemy, and death their only friend.It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:—such is the God of the Pentateuch.

Robert G. Ingersoll

We don’t like death. We’d rather produce seeds another way. But death to ourselves, our agendas, our expectations, our hopes is necessary to find deep joy that comes when we fully relinquish ourselves to the gospel.

Mary E. DeMuth

The endWhen I die bang on cansRomp around in leaps and boundsLet whips crack in the airCall in clowns and acrobats!I want my coffin to go on a donkeyDecked out in Andalusian styleYou can't refuse anything to a dead manAnd I want, by all means, go on a donkey

Mário de Sá-Carneiro

One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven’t all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each would reveal a little shadowy spot, a dot of black which seemed to flash on the water, and so across the whole surface of the pond there was what could only be described as the inverse of sparkling; a scintillant blackness. Shining blackly, black but rippling, lyrical: the sheen and radiance of death-in-life.Is that my work, to point to the world and say, See how darkly it sparkles?

Mark Doty

The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.

Émile Zola

Chasing the external to achieve joy is a death-trap for personal-development.

Bryant McGill

I know the moment you died,Jesus' face was smiling on you,Welcoming you into His glorious city of gold. I know you are enjoying the incredible light and peace of His presence right now

Lisa Bedrick

It should be the art of Christians to present death as a passage to a better life, to labour to bring our souls into such a condition, as to think death not to be a death to us, but the death of itself. Death dies when I die, and I begin to live when I die. It is a sweet passage to life. We never live till we die.

Richard Sibbes

Such is true joy’s absolute certainty,Its slow lit fuse that burns holesIn the shabby shroud of death forever.

Scott Hastie

People who are afraid of death are afraid of lif

François Lelord

Live a passionate life. Life can end any time, any day.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Live each day as if it was your last day on earth.

Lailah Gifty Akita

After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy.

Criss Jami

If your hope dieth, your duties die, your endeavors die, your joys die, and your souls die. And if your hope be not acted, but lie asleep, it is next to dead, both in likenss and preparation( 585).

Richard Baxter

I suppose that I have not many months to live: but of course I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.

Henry David Thoreau

Ester would tell her to dance faster, leap higher, to laugh out loud with all the breath in lungs. That’s what the dead would tell the living, if they could—to grab hold of joy whenever it comes.

Claudia Gray

She was crouched in the corner of the room, eating something off the floor. It was the old woman dressed in endless black. When she looked up this time there was no question she was there for me. She had the face of my mother but much older, her ancient decayed mouth coming closer for her good-night kiss. I steeled myself against her putrid smell, the mouthful of bitter dust, but as her lips touched mine it was like biting into a purple black plum whose fruit was brilliant red, like an explosion of intense joy. Its childhood smell wrinkled my nose with pleasure, its sweet juices ran down my chin, turning into a beautiful black ocean where I floated safely, not lost as I had imagined, but securely tucked away deep in space.

Mary Woronov

Worthy or not, you will receive your destiny. Awake or not you will notice.

Julieanne O'Connor

The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars... I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.I knew I had come there out of kindness, theirs and mine. The grief that came to me then was nothing like the grief I had felt for myself alone... This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost. I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

Wendell Berry

Death is one lover who cannot be spurned.

Nenia Campbell

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Some people's glasses are half full. I'm the one drinking them. Some people have forgotten that Pluto is still a planet. I still remember my childhood. Some people are vegans. I have common sense.Some people call me Maurice. Some people call me the Gangsta of Love. Some people just want to live...but me, I'm the one still alive.

Dave Matthes

Niko popped a spare slice of bacon in his mouth, chewing it up contentedly. “I hate being a soul, being dead. You know what I hate most about it?”“No sex?” Sophie guessed.“That’s what I hate second most about it. No, what I hate most is—”“That you can’t lie,” Adrian cut in.Niko lifted his eyebrows at him, impressed. “You do know me. Exactly right.”“And no bacon,” Freya added.

Molly Ringle

Sex doesn't satisfy for a lifetime, the more you have it, the more you want it. And the more you have it, the more you die out.

Michael Bassey Johnson

I am waltzing with death, flirting with him, but he stands there smiling and saying nothing because he does not need to woo or be wooed: he knows he gets us all in the end.

Nenia Campbell

I don't see anything other than pretensions and low mentality in women who make a man run after a hole that would soon be inhabited by termites and worms.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.

William Faulkner

Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level.

Kōbō Abe

Life will hack off your head and shit down your neck every chance it gets. I've found that consuming drugs and booze, listening to music and always having an excuse in the best way to tip the scales.

Dave Matthes

A lot of who you were in middle age was determined before you had a chance to manipulate, control, or eve understand the things around you. It was no mystery, he thought, why some old people's minds returned to their youth; the wonder of those years, the discoveries, the first experience with the dirty secret of death, and the first stirrings of lust and love were indelible, drawn in luminous colors on clean canvas. Indeed, the first sex act was so mind-boggling that most people could still remember it clearly twenty, thirty, sixty years later.

Nelson DeMille

Sex is the glue of relationships, Caitlin, and it's what life is all about. It's the opposite of death, of giving up, of getting swamped by... What's out there. See it as symbolic.

Mark Chadbourn

Like sexual intercourse, death needs foreplay.

Martin Page

AIDS would have claimed fewer lives if we had publicly recommended what I wish to call ‘The Presumption of Sickness,’ i.e., the principle that whomever we are about to sleep with is HIV-positive until proven HIV-negative.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The Baron was good with two things: sex, and death. And what was sex anyway—what was orgasm but what the French (those cunning linguists of the language of love) referred to as a Little Death? What was life but a ticking clock toward the grave, and how did life start but with an unfettered hump toward morning?

Daniel Younger

big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death.

Jared Diamond

The Romans’ ideal was torn between heroism and glory. Both are epitomized in the instant of death. To die ‘fine death’ was their obsession: to snatch that moment, to gather - carpere - the instant of death. Tiberius died from the effort he had expended at the age of seventy-three by throwing the javelin at a boar in the arena at Circeii. The moment of death isn’t just a subject for painters. It isn’t simply the stuff of the odes and annals. The moment of death exists in the amphitheatre: human sacrifices, bullfights, denudations, tortures and carnivorous scenes. The ancient Romans had taken over the ‘sport’ associated with the figure of Phersu from the Etruscans. The populus romanus gambled on the men who would be put to death within the next hour- The jus gladii - this is the Roman Empire (the right of the sword, the right of life and death).

Pascal Quignard

As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next.

Ibn Warraq

Only those who transcend into another world, knows there.

Lailah Gifty Akita

What are we fighting for? When go down the grave naked?

Lailah Gifty Akita

The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times. . . . But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature.

Ferdinand Cohn

He saw two stars collapse against one another and a nova form; it flared up and then, as he watched, it began to die out. He saw it turn from a furiously blazing ring into a dim core of dead iron and then he saw it cool into darkness. More stars cooled with it; he saw the force of entropy, the method of the Destroyer of Forms, retract the stars into dull reddish coals and then into dust-like silence. A shroud of thermal energy hung uniformly over the world,over this strange and little world for which he had no love or use.It's dying, he realized. The universe. The thermal haze spread on and on until it became only a disturbance, nothing more; the sky glowed weakly with it and then flickered. Even the uniform thermal disbursement was expiring. How strange and goddamn awful, he thought. He got to his feet, moved a step toward the door.And there, on his feet, he died.They found him an hour later. Seth Morley stood with his wife at the far end of the knot of people jammed into the small room and said to himself, "to keep him from helping with the prayer". "The same force that shut down the transmitter," Ignatz Thugg said. "They knew; they knew if he phrased the prayer it would go through. Even without the relay." He looked gray and frightened. All of them did, Seth Morley noticed. Their faces, in the light of the room, had a leaden, stone-like cast. Like, he thought, thousand-year-old idols.Time, he thought, is shutting down around us. It is as if the future is gone, for all of us.

Philip K Dick

Jump in the urinal and stand on your head. I'm the one that's alive. You're all dead.

Philip K Dick

As a sea is full of drops of liquid, I was but one in the ocean of WarMany are swept ruthlessly into the battering, bashing waves, and only few survive to swim to shore

Jade Kosche

There is no corelation between life and death, except that life is the biggest lie we believed, while death; is the most certain truth.

Husam Wafaei

It comes out from no source, it goes back in through no aperture. It has reality yet no place where it resides; it has duration yet no beginning or end. Something emerges, though through no aperture - this refers to the fact that it has reality. It has reality yet there is no place where it resides - this refers to the dimension of space. It has duration but no beginning or end - this refers to the dimension of time. There is life, there is death, there is a coming out, there is a going back in - yet in the coming out and going back its form is never seen. This is called the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing. Being cannot create being out of being; inevitably it must come forth from nonbeing. Nonbeing is absolute nonbeing, and it is here that the sage hides himself.

Zhuangzi

He gets away with it because he's strong.''This is the story of mankind.''I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.''Yes. But then I read the newspaper.

Christopher Buehlman

The very possibility of death focuses the mind wonderfully.

Jasper Fforde

If you can kill it, or it can kill you, it's real.

Laini Taylor

No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.

Tom Stoppard

Life's just a dream. It isn't real. I know that you can't see that yet. You want me to wake up but in my death I did wake up and I saw you were still sleeping.

Kate McGahan

Laugh not at the dead, for the corpse at your feet is prophetic of your own destiny.

Mamur Mustapha

A funeral is like a little game, really. You have to just play along and say the right thing and behave the right way until it’s over. Be pleasant but don’t smile too much; be sad but don’t overdo it or the family will feel worse than they already do. Be hopeful but don’t let your optimism be taken as a lack of empathy or an inability to deal with the reality. Because if anybody was to be truly honest there would be a lot of arguments, finger-pointing, tears, snot, and screaming.

Cecelia Ahern

Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

Salman Rushdie

The impeccable watchmaker geared the noble self to suffer. The ineluctable part of being human is perpetual sorrow, grief, and misery. Suffering is part of living. Life begins joyously and regretfully ends in tragedy. The cold realities of the world triumphantly crush each one of us. Between birth and death is comedic conjugation, the haunting prelude to the end of the self.

Kilroy J. Oldster

She was always left feeling like a murderer. Because the messenger becomes the murderer. Until the fatal words are spoken, the loved one concerned is still alive, waking, sleeping, going about his business, making telephone calls, writing letters, going for walks, breathing, seeing. It was the telling that killed.

Rosamunde Pilcher

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera.Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the "forests of symbols."(The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)

Milan Kundera

The locals died and shrivelled with the autumnal leaves as their plastic, seasonal smiles faded with the last of the holidaymakers.

Moonshine Noire

Have we ever thought to consider that God allows things in our lives to die so that in that death we might come to the precious realization of how little we’ve actually lived in the first place?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do.

Rivka Galchen

We think that we are living when we walk upon the earth but the very moment we “die” there, we wake up here! This life on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge is the real one. We find that our life on earth was just a dream, a dream designed to lead us further and further into love. True love grows and then cannot be destroyed. It grows and grows until it is stronger than death.

Kate McGahan

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Death Quotes - Page 60

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