Jacques Derrida Quotes

Knowing how to die is knowing how to live. What is death anyway? It's the outcome of life.

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.

I don't want to die of some disease I want to die of death

The only reason we die, is because we accept death as an inevitability.

He will live ill who does not know how to die well.

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.

Acceptance of death when it arrives is one thing, but to allow it to upstage the joys of living is ingratitude.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life.

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.

Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.

When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire.

You can't really live until you are no longer afraid to die.

I am not in the least surprised that your impression of death becomes more lively, in proportion as age and infirmity bring it nearer. God makes use of this rough trial to undeceive us in respect to our courage, to make us feel our weakness, and to keep us in all humility in His hands.

Granted that I must die, how shall I live?

It is rather interesting how you get used to death.

When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.

Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist.

We figure out what death means when we're born, practically, and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it.

In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, “Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us.

Once you learn how to die you learn how to live.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

A culture that denies death inevitably becomes shallow and superficial, concerned only with the external form of things. When death is denied, life loses its depth.

I wasn't particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don't have to die the next.

Never fear Death for you will feel aroused by his sleep. Never cheat death or he will slap you with a sentence of misery for the defeat.

Life becomes livable only to the extent that death is treated as a friend, never as an enemy.