Pico Iyer Quotes

I believe that fear of life brings a greater fear of death.

The Fear of Death often proves Mortal.

The fear of death is far greater than the death itself. But the fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all!

We are so afraid of the idea of having to die... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn.

I find looking forward scary because you might die.

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.

Hence the tension, the anxiety, the anguish of humanity. The more you fight with death, the more anxiety-ridden you will become, you are bound to become. That's a natural consequence of it.

Death approaches, which is always impending like the stone over Tantalus: then comes superstition with which he who is imbued can never have peace of mind.

And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

I'm afraid of death, obviously.

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it.

Even the bold will fly when they see Death drawing in close enough to end their life.

How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.

Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.

Why do we cling to life and why are we afraid of death? You may not have thought about it. The reason why we cling so much to life and why we are afraid of death is just inconceivable. We cling to life so much because we do not know how to live. We cling to life so much because really we are not alive. And time is passing and death is coming nearer and nearer. And we are afraid that death is coming near and we have not lived yet.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

My fears are agitated to an extreme degree and the dread of death involves me in a stupor of chilling indisposition.

Most of us harbour a significant amount of subconscious fear about death, and act out of this fear in our daily lives.

Mortality applies to every aspect of life. The fear of death is the driving fear of life.

I think that when we wrestle with death... we start fearing life, because then we come to terms with something that is inevitable.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

My day-to-day local issues are rooted in an underlying fear of death.