Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.

Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.

I think you die the way you live.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds of rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. The supply is too large.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

What about life, Ninotchka? Do Russians never think about life, of the moment in which we are living? It's the only moment we ever really have.

From Plato: the man who has an elevated mind and takes a view of all time and of all substance, dost thou suppose it possible for him to think that human life is anything great? It is not possible, he said. Such a man then will think that death also is no evil.

Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick.

I like to think that death gives life meaning. I like that philosophy.

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

Each man is everything to himself, for with his death everything is dead for him. That is why each of us thinks he is everything to everyone. We must not judge nature by ourselves, but by its own standards.

Life is real, and death is the illusion.

You are a little soul bearing about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.

There's a way of life, there's a way of death. Which way are you on?

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.

Thou madest man, he knows not why, he thinks he was not made to die.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

I wince at her use of the word "human." I've never liked that differentiation. She is living and I'm dead, but we're both human. Call me an idealist.

Thus, I always began by assuming the worst; my appeal was dismissed. That meant, of course, I was to die. Sooner than others, obviously. 'But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.' And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-- since, in either case, other men will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably.

The old grey donkey, Eeyore stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, "Why?" and sometimes he thought, "Wherefore?" and sometimes he thought, "Inasmuch as which?" and sometimes he didn't quite know what he was thinking about.

The most important philosophy I think is that even if it isn't true you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife.

If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live.

If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images.

What are clouds, but an excuse for the sky? What is life, but an escape from death?