Studs Terkel Quotes

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

Life is apogee, apex, decline; life is death - and everything else is open to discussion.

After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.

Is death that which gives meaning to life?

Life was a pre-death experience.

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

All of us want to live, and that is absolutely natural. However, we should learn from childhood on to choose our best way to die. If we don't do that, we end up spending our days like a dog, only in search of harbour, food and expressing a blind loyalty to his owner in return. That isn't enough to make our lives have a meaning.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

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.

The two most mysterious things in our lives are birth and death. They are both miraculous events; one brings shiny, brand new life into the world, and the other snuffs it out like that. That person isn't there anymore.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

And what's a life? - a weary pilgrimage, Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.

Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.

Quotes about Life Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art; to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

Does anything really matter? We all end up in the same place. All that's left is our Wikipedia entry.

That's when you realize that most of it-life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.

The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.

The world is a playground, and death is the night.

A life of nothing's nothing worth, From that first nothing ere his birth, To that last nothing under earth.