Bryan Magee Quotes

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

As much as we'd like to think life is sacred, there's not a lot of evidence for that. The universe is maddeningly casual, giving and taking it.

I think I want to talk about life from the point of view of death.

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

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

I start thinking about life after death. I've got to quit thinking about it because it's very deep. Very deep. Sometimes you start thinking about it, and you don't feel like you want to be alive, so I don't like to get all quiet.

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

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

The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.

On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

I was obsessed with not knowing what happened after you were dead. And I sat or kneeled for a whole day with my head against the wall, trying to figure it out. But I couldn't, and I just said, 'Okay.' And then it was nothingness.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. 'Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won't? How do I know there's anything there except what I'm conscious of?'

One is born, one lives, one dies. What death is, I don't know.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.

The thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a virtuous man.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

When you have solved all the mysteries of life you long for death, for it is but another mystery of life.

In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.

Life's something we already understand. Death is a mystery.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation