Seneca the Younger Quotes

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

Very few people are acquainted with death. They undergo it, commonly, not so much out of resolution as custom and insensitivity; and most men die because they cannot help it.

Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city.

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

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.

Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.

Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.

My feelings about my mortality are less selfish than they used to be. I used to affect a cavalier attitude to death; now I see it from my son's perspective.

Dying is one of those things that can’t be fixed. Not by talking about it, not with all the brain surge in the world.

No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.

I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn't given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die... His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such.

Everyone knows they re going to die,' he said again, 'but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.

Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?

It's unknown the place and uncertain the time where death awaits you; thus you must expect death to find you, every time, at every place.

We all know that the people we love are mortal, we all know we’re mortal, we know it’s going to end; you cannot prepare yourself for it.

We all know we're going to die. We're all circling the drain. Some of us are closer than others. I'm 90, I know I'm closer to the drain than most people.

The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true

When death comes, he respects neither age nor merit. He sweeps from the earthly existence the sick and the strong, the rich and the poor, and should teach us to live to be prepared for death.

I am about to die. It is September 11, and every cell in my body is acutely aware of my looming demise. The certainty of it. The inevitability. Not years from now, not weeks nor days. Moments.

To take life was to understand your own death--that the Hour of the Huntsman also came for you.

Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying

All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where.

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.