Lionel Barrymore Quotes

Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.

Life, the permission to know death.

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

I always know I can die at any moment.

What helps with aging is serious cognition - thinking and understanding. You have to truly grasp that everybody ages. Everybody dies. There is no turning back the clock. So the question in life becomes: What are you going to do while you're here?

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

You've gotta know what death is to know life!

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

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.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin.

Whatever we say and mean by life is just a journey toward death. If you can understand that your whole life is just a journey and nothing else, then you are less interested in life and more interested in death. And once someone becomes more interested in death, he can go deep into the very depths of life; otherwise, he is just going to remain on the surface.

No one gets out of here alive.

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.

Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.

It is not dying, but living, that is a preparation for Death.

We figure out what death means when we're born, practically, and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it.

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

No art is possible without a dance with death.

So the first thing: become aware of death. Think about it, look at it, contemplate it. Do not be afraid, do not escape the fact. It is there and you cannot escape it! It has come into existence with you.

You never know what life means till you die; even throughout life, tis death that makes life live.