Sidney Poitier Quotes

I have no fear of death whatsoever. I suspect that few people do, what they all fear is what might happen in the years or months before death.

Once in a while, when I'm alone, I think about my age. I think, How many more years do I have on this earth? But I can't really conceive of dying. Somehow, in my head, I don't think I'll die. I know that everybody dies, of course. I just think that it'll never come to me. It's crazy, but there it is.

I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me.

I never had a conscious fear of death, but I did have a conscious fear of sickness. By the time I completed medical school, that fear was gone.

I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.

As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.

Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive -- to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling -- to be not being, not to be.

Would it hurt to die? All those times he had thought it was about to happen and escaped, he had never really thought of the thing itself: his will to live had always been so much stronger than his fear of death.

Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.

Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is.

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 know that whenever I think about death, I come up against a stone wall.

Everything I do has the tinge of the finite, of my own demise. At some point you either accept death or you just keep pushing it back as you get older and older. I've accepted it.

In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.

Just because you've faced your own mortality, it doesn't make it any less frightening.

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

I don't think kids have a problem with death. It's us older ones who are nearer to it, that start being frightened.

I'm happier because I had to face what all of us try not to face: that we're going to die. It's a fact.

Though I'm 75, I'm not looking forward to death, but it's there for all of us.

Obviously, death is ahead of me. I don't look forward to dying one little bit. But, you know, I simply don't worry about it because it's going to happen to me as it does to anybody.

Even the stout of heart shrink when they see the approach of death.

If I am killed, I can die by once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.

I'm afraid of death... Yes, but that doesn't stop death coming.