Epictetus Quotes

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

Human beings are afraid of dying. They are always running after something: money, honor, and pleasure. But if you had to die now, what would you want?

A small fact: You are going to die....does this worry you?

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

I've always been terrified of dying, always. It was a concern of mine long before it had to be.

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

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.

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.

I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear... that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived.

Oliver: Fear is the natural state of anything that dies.

To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not. For it is to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessings of human beings. And yet people fear it as if they knew for certain it is the greatest evil.

To fear death is the way to live long; to lie afraid of death is to be long a dying.

But we are not interested in death at all: rather, we escape the facts, we are continuously escaping the facts. Death is there, and every moment we are dying. Death is not something far away, it is here and now: we are dying. But while we are dying we go on being concerned about life. This concern with life, this over concern with life, is just an escape, just a fear. Death is there, deep inside - growing.

Every fear is fear of death.

Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?

Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.

Every tiny part of us cries out against the idea of dying, and hopes to live forever.

Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is.

Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.

He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life.

I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.

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.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.