Sam Harris Quotes

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.

I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.

I just wish that people will be kinder to me when I pass away.

I envy the dead.

The stroke has given me another way to serve people. It lets me feel more deeply the pain of others; to help them know by example that ultimately, whatever happens, no harm can come. 'Death is perfectly safe,' I like to say.

To have died once is enough.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.

If we talk about 'Groundhog Day' as a humanistic text - we only have one life, and there's no punishment or reward afterwards - then the wisdom is, just be kind because that will make you happy and the people around you happy.

When you are confronted with a level of devastating disease and death, you never lose that sense of unbelievable humility.

You never really feel somebody's suffering. You only feel their death.

He who, seeking his own happiness, punishes or kills beings who also long for happiness, will not find happiness after his death.

Even death has a heart.

people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.

Just as compassion is the wish that all sentient beings be free of suffering, loving-kindness is the wish that all may enjoy happiness.

We enjoy some gratification when our good friends die; for though their death leaves us in sorrow, we have the consolatory assurance that they are beyond the ills by which in this life even the best of people are broken down or corrupted.

Any woman's death diminishes me.

If you want to live your whole life free from pain you must become either a god or else a corpse. Consider other men's troubles and that will comfort you.

Passing away" is written on the world and all the world contains.

How many of us will be saved the pain of seeing the most important things in our lives disappearing from one moment to the next? I don't just mean people, but our ideas and dreams too: we might survive a day, a week, a few years, but we're all condemned to lose. Our body remains alive, yet sooner or later our soul will receive the mortal blow. The perfect crime - for we don't know who murdered our joy, what their motives were, or where the guilty parties are to be found...they too are the victims of the reality they created.

I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.

Death Is only the easy way out if you are the one who dies.

The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.