Jules Renard Quotes

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

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

I have sometimes imagined my own death and brought myself to tears.

I’m ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable.

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.

He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for, as he rose and walked through the castle for the last time, out into the grounds and into the forest?

Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

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

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.

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

There's not a higher stake than someone having to face their own death.

In modern times, if you're on an airplane and it's going down, that's it. You've got a couple of minutes, if that, to work out where you stand in relationship to the whole of your life.

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

Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.

You can actually be bored stiff while you're dying.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

The minute someone tells you you have cancer, it's kind of like you die. You really do die. It's like you get that you're mortal.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

I think a lot about death more than life, because we're going towards death.

When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal.

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.