Sam Keen Quotes

I've always had an acute sense of mortality, maybe because my father's a minister.

It doesn't take that many years for a kid to realise that they're going to die. It's always there in the back of their mind the rest of their lives.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

At the same time, I've never been afraid of death or the concept of death.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Why would you be afraid of death? It would be an inconvenience. I have a lot of undone things and it's bound to get in the way. But, no, it doesn't scare me at all.

I just don't really think about death.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.

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.

The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

When vitality runs high, death takes men by surprise. But if they close their eyes to this possibility, what they gain in peace they lose in sensibility and significance.

Change the emphasis, turn your attention around. If you become concerned with death, your life comes to be revealed to you for the first time, because the moment you become at ease with death you have gained a life that cannot die. The moment you have known death, you have known that life which is eternal.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.

It is not about striving for immortality, but about accepting mortality.

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.

There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.

Man is unique in that, unlike animals, he knows he is going to die, and unlike animals he can do something about it.