Friedrich Durrenmatt Quotes

Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront.

Mortality defines the human condition.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

I am really curious about life, about why we are all here. I notice my skin is ageing, things are changing, I've seen people dying, so that's the train we are all on.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful.

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

Death is an absolute marvel.

I know all human beings will be successful. How do I know? They all die.

If we don't know life, how can we know death?

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

The fact that we die is one of the more interesting things that happen to us. Fiction ought to be about bottom lines, and that's as bottom-line as you can get.

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.