Joko Beck Quotes

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.

Mortality applies to every aspect of life. The fear of death is the driving fear of life.

One reason most people never stop thinking is that mental frenzy keeps us from having to see the upsetting aspects of our lives. If I'm constantly brooding about my children or career, I won't notice that I'm lonely. If I grapple continuously with logistical problems, I can avoid contemplating little issues like, say, my own mortality.

We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

The Fear of Death often proves Mortal.

And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

I feel the fear touches on something deeper. A sense perhaps of, "My life is speeding past me and I can't get a handle on it."

Every fear is fear of death.

We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live.

You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.

I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.

People are afraid to die, and even more afraid to live.

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.

Most of us harbour a significant amount of subconscious fear about death, and act out of this fear in our daily lives.

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.

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

I believe that fear of life brings a greater fear of death.

I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.

The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.

I think that when we wrestle with death... we start fearing life, because then we come to terms with something that is inevitable.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.