Lao Tzu Quotes

I was fascinated by mortality. Most people are, even if they don't admit it.

You're immortal, aren't you, until you get a little peek over the precipice. The thought of death...You're not supposed to start pondering it until you're old. And there's nothing like being told you've got a life-threatening disease to concentrate your mind on that.

The clouds that gather round the setting sun, Do take a sober colouring from an eye, That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.

The big change is the proximity to death.

Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.

The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters-it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too son and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.

It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.

If people are not afraid of dying, why threaten them with death?

Usually the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives.

I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I've always thought about it.

Do you think that people ever really do believe they will die, that the world will just go along as always without them? I wonder if we aren't all a little surprised at the moment of crossover, if we don't look back over our shoulders saying, Now hold on.

If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive? My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable. Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.

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

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 understanding that we reach a point where we stop becoming something and start ending as something. That comes at different times in different points in different people's lives, and obviously there are lots of people who experience the presence of death much more keenly and much earlier than I did. But we all come to grips with it eventually.

We are born knowing death.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

To almost die is to know that one day you will, and to never again feel the same about anything.

It's more enjoyable for me to know that life is finite. Knowing that, I would like to go to a party.

The eunuch had looked death in the face, so near he might have kissed her on the lips.

I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.

As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.

There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.

People are usually pretty hungry after a funeral. I guess it's because we all realize that time is running out and we better eat all we can. Please don't mention that to my mother.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.