25 Deep Quotes about Life and Death

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial (Dollar Newspaper, July 31, 1844), The works of Edgar Allan Poe (1903), Volume 2, Page 258

Some men never die and some men never live but we’re all alive tonight.Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (Black Sparrow Press, ed. 1986), Page 13

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography (Postscriptum de Ma Vie) (1907), Chapter IX. Life and Death, Page 267

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (MacCurdy, ed. 1938), Page 71

Let us be on our guard against saying that death is contrary to life. The living being is only a species of dead being, and a very rare species.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science or The Joyful Wisdom (1882) (Dover, ed. 2006), Page 82

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)

The aim of all life is death.Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), (W. W. Norton, ed. 1961), Page 32

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952), (George Braziller, ed. 1963), Page 2

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Page 1024

Life and death are too resolute, too implacable to be accidental.Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (1964), Page 286

It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987)

People’s whole lives do pass in front of their eyes before they die. The process is called “living.”Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent (1998), (HarperCollins, ed. 1999), Page 194

The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930), (Random House, ed. 1964), Page 161

If you don’t think about death, you don’t appreciate life.John Grisham, The Firm (1991)

In the midst of life we are in death.Agatha Christie, Peril at End House (1932)

Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man.William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929), (Modern Library, ed. 1956), Page 125

For life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin’; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

Life is uncertain, death is most certain.Latin Quotes

All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (1959), (ed. 1961), Page 219

Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)

Everyone asks what the meaning of life is, but no one asks about the meaning of death.Jo Nesbø, Nemesis (2002)

Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis.Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train (2015)

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.Victor Hugo, Les misérables (1862), (The Modern Library, ed. 1862), Page 860

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined.Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)