Victor Hugo Quotes

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.

So the first thing: become aware of death. Think about it, look at it, contemplate it. Do not be afraid, do not escape the fact. It is there and you cannot escape it! It has come into existence with you.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Everyone knows they re going to die,' he said again, 'but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.

There is but one freedom, To put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved, and not the reverse.

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.

It is not dying, but living, that is a preparation for Death.

I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.

I suppose you do think about the time that's allotted to you more than when you were younger. The mortality thing obviously has a stronger pull for you. It's an imminent truth; it's not necessarily a bad thing. You realize - much earlier than my age now - that you won't be able to play for England's football team, just to take a really crass example. So you can't have that life again. Unless you believe in reincarnation or whatever. Reincarnation? That's a whole other question. I find people who talk about that sort of thing in interviews idiotic. And I don't want to go down with them.

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.

Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live and what will amaze you even more, throughout life you must learn to die. Seneca (Roman philosopher)

The whole life of a philosopher is the meditation of his death.

Knowledge of death is the beginning of wisdom.

I see Death as the part of us that knows all the time that we're going to die, reminding us to live properly.

To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live.

If a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

The first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die ... and to live.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.

The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.