Death Awareness Quotes

It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.

Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing.

As a society, when you have your mortality slapped in your face, it changes you.

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

A lot of people are not used to having death in their lives or anything like that and I think that's not incredibly natural either. So it definitely can take its toll. At the same time I think it's important to face your own mortality, which I do most every day by doing the show, to realize that your life is short and to take the opportunities that you need to take and be fearless.

I don't care what happens in 100 years. I won't be around.

And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.

Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely.

I just don't really think about death.

The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no'.

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

I've always been somebody who's acutely aware of my mortality.

If I lack awareness, then why should I care what happens to me when I am dead?

Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.

To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.

Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.

Until having kids, I had never really thought about mortality so much.

Somebody said the prospect of eminent death has a wonderful clarifying effect on the mind. And I don't know if that's true, but I do think it probably causes some changes, some evolution in the way a person works. But on a day-by-day basis, I just still enjoy doing what I'm doing.

Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

When I turned 50, I realized I was now going to start counting backwards in terms of the years I had left. Then I turned 60, and I just stopped counting. I don't have a fear of death, but I have an awareness that there's a time limit.