Alain de Botton Quotes

I'm not dying until I do.

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.

In every cradle decked with rosy wreath Lurk germs of death.

I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

Let every man in mankind's frailtyConsider his last day; and let nonePresume on his good fortune until he findLife, at his death, a memory without pain.

Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse.

Every day a little death.

...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.

An early taste of death is not necessarily a bad thing.

I have decided not to die.

But death we are, and death we've always been.

One of the things that we talked about was this idea of 'Memento Mori' - like the reminder of our own mortality - and so we were sort of trying to express that in our press photos. And it's one of the themes of the album [Modern Vampires of the City] as well.

We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.

So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade; All love, all liking, all delight Lies drowned with us in endless night. Then while time serves, and we are but decaying; Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a Maying.

The waves of time wash us all clean.

We like to think of life as a constant ... Yet it can be ended in a heartbeat.

I was thinking Im going to die but I'm not going to tap

the brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life.

Well, that’s that, then. We’re all going to die. Charming.

Rien n'est plus parfait, plus acheve qu'un cadavre. Nothing is more perfect, more complete than a corpse.

We see time's furrows on another's brow, And death intrench'd, preparing his assault; How few themselves in that just mirror see!