Zhuangzi Quotes

Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

I think you are born, and I think you die. I have a pragmatic nature, but I yearn to believe.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.

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

I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

And how do I know that the hate of death is not like a man who has lost his home when young and does not know where his home is to return to?

Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.

Why fear death? Be scared of living.

We can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.

To go back is nothing but death; but to go forward is fear of death and life everlasting beyond.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

While there's life, there's fear.

Life is a series of avoiding horrible situations until ultimately you're dead. That's how I feel about things.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.