Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.

I believe in facing reality. But only because I don't like turning my back on it.

'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.

Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.

Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.

A man must be prepared to face life, as well as death, there's no escape from either.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

It is the opposite of ignorance—it is intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what they are even when it is hard.

Those are facts. Are they the truth? No, for they do not tell you of the heart, and that is where truth lives.

When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception.

Living is death; dying is life. We are not what we appear to be. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that citizens; on this side orphans, on that children.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Facing facts is always empowering.

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

We cannot pretend that reality is different from what it is.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself.

The thing about death is that it's honest.

I have no fear of death. More important, I don't fear life.

Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.

Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.

Death and sex are the dominant reality of our day.