Peter Ustinov Quotes

Death is a false fear. When it is here, you won't be. When it's not, you are here.

Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.

Though I'm 75, I'm not looking forward to death, but it's there for all of us.

Obviously, death is ahead of me. I don't look forward to dying one little bit. But, you know, I simply don't worry about it because it's going to happen to me as it does to anybody.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?

The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual's way of being in the world.

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.

I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

I don't think kids have a problem with death. It's us older ones who are nearer to it, that start being frightened.

I am not afraid to die. I simply do not want to.

Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.

We're so afraid of death in our culture, but I think if we understand it better, then we'll appreciate the life we have more.

When I was young, I used to be very frightened of getting older and of death. Now, I'm more resigned to the inevitability.

I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.

I don't want to die. I can't wrap my head around the concept of death because I'm totally atheist. There's nothing after life in my head, whether that's right or wrong.

If you live right, death is a joke to you as far as fear is concerned.

I'm not afraid of death. That is the greatest mystery of all. That'll be it, that one. But it is all a race against time.

I mean, we're all going to die. We know that on an intellectual level. We figure it out when we're still fairly young, and it scares us so badly that we convince ourselves we're immortal for more than a decade afterwards.

I'm not afraid of being dead, that's to say there's nothing to be afraid of. I won't know I'm dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I'm alive in any way at all, that'll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.

I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

But death doesn't scare me. To know exactly when I might expect it, up close and in my face, would actually be a comfort. Because to tell the truth, most of the time dying seems pretty much like my only means of escape.

Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.