Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

I have come to know that it [death] is an important thing to keep in mind - not to complain or to make melancholy, but simply because only with the honest knowledge that one day I will die I can ever truly begin to live.

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

Granted that I must die, how shall I live?

Only when you know how to die can you know how to live.

Only by being prepared for your death can you ever truly live.

Knowledge of death is the beginning of wisdom.

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

If this was the last day of your life, would you spend it the way you're spending today?

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

Death shows up to remind us to live more fully.

Everyone's dying. A little, every day. Make it count.

In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?

The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.

I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.

The whole life of a philosopher is the meditation of his death.

Nothing quite brings out the zest for life in a person like the thought of their impending 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.

The most dangerous man on earth is the man who has reckoned with his own death. All men die; few men ever really live.

The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.

I see Death as the part of us that knows all the time that we're going to die, reminding us to live properly.

Every man regards his own life as the New Year's Eve of time.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition.