Will Durant Quotes

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?

Human experience resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.

Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is.

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

We are washed both on coming into the world and on going out of it, and we take no pleasure from the first washing nor any profit from the last.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

Death swallows death.

Man is immortal; therefore he must die endlessly. For life is a creative idea; it can only find itself in changing forms

This is the spot where I will lie When life has had enough of me, These are the grasses that will blow Above me like a living sea. These gay old lilies will not shrink To draw their life from death of mine, And I will give my body's fire To make blue flowers on this vine. "O Soul," I said, "have you no tears? Was not the body dear to you?" I heard my soul say carelessly, "The myrtle flowers will grow more blue.

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.

We're all immortal until we die.

If you were not born in this world, there would be no need to die. To be born in this world is to die, to disappear [laughing].

The last to be overcome is death, and the knowledge of life is the knowledge of death.

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

We die, because we live.

In living we die, in dying we live.

Spring flies, and with it all the train it leads; and flowers, in fading, leave us but their seeds.