Kenneth Branagh Quotes

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.

To philosophize is to learn to die.

I think we live in slavery to fear. Most people don't have an answer to the death question and really don't even have a philosophy. That is a puzzle to me. I think even if I was not a Christian, I would want to at least have a personal solution to the death question. Otherwise, death is just a frightening thing.

The whole life of a philosopher is the meditation of his death.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.

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?

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?

Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages

Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?

If I just got up in the morning and had no place to go and was retired or something, I would be sitting there and be thinking, "Gee, what is the purpose of life? Why are we all finite? Why do we get old and die? Is there nothing out there? Why is it so tragic? Why do our loved ones perish? Why do we generate?" Who wants to think about that stuff?

... there is a skeleton (or death) that flees terrified in the face of my will to live.

There are evils worse than death.

For many sportsmen, coming face to face with irrefutable evidence of their mortality is the moment they dread above all others.

My spirit is too weak--mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.

I saw my own blood and I thought, how could I live in a world where this exists- where love can become death?

Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to affront an almighty and eternal God?

Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.

There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.

The premonition of death may for many be a stimulus to novelty of experience: the imminence of death serves to sweep away the inessential preoccupations for those who do not flee from the thought of death into triviality.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

And that must end us, that must be our cure: To be no more. Sad cure! For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish, rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night Devoid of sense and motion?

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