Seneca the Younger Quotes

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death's inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.

Would it hurt to die? All those times he had thought it was about to happen and escaped, he had never really thought of the thing itself: his will to live had always been so much stronger than his fear of death.

We push time from us, and we wish him back; * * * * * * Life we think long and short; death seek and shun.

YOU FEAR TO DIE? "It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break.

But I knew that someday I was going to die. And just before I died two things would happen; Number 1: I would regret my entire life. Number 2: I would want to live my life over again.

How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back?

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

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.

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

As a culture, we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don't want to die. It's like, 'Well, too bad, we do.'

In modern times, if you're on an airplane and it's going down, that's it. You've got a couple of minutes, if that, to work out where you stand in relationship to the whole of your life.

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

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal.

I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.

Horror, almost better than any of the other genres, pits the will to live against the will toward nihilism. I just think that's worth exploring. I don't know what is more important, actually, to explore than that very dynamic.

Death has a way of making us all stop and think about life.

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own... the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.

Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.

Death is just around the corner. If only it would stay there.

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.