Famous Quotes & Sayings

Arthur Schopenhauer

There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.

Dylan Thomas

Though they go mad they shall be sane, though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion.

Dalai Lama

Ageing destroys youth, sickness destroys health, degeneration of life destroys all excellent qualities and death destroys life. Even if you are a great runner, you cannot run away from death. you cannot stop death with your wealth, through your magic performances or recitation of mantras or even medicines. Therefore, it is wise to prepare for your death.

Dalai Lama

The process of dying begins with the dissolution of the elements within the body. It has eight stages, beginning with the dissolution of the earth element, then the water, fire and windelements. The color: appearance of a white vision, increase of the red element, black near-attainment, and finally the clear light of death.

Dalai Lama

To my mind, there are two things that, in life, you can do about death. Either you can choose to ignore it, in which case you may have some success in making the idea of it go away for a limited period of time, or you can confront the prospect of your own death and try to analyze it and, in so doing, try to minimize some of the inevitable suffering that it causes. Neither way can you actually overcome it.

Dalai Lama

I hold the view that death is rather like changing one's clothes when they are torn and old. It is not an end in itself. Yet death is unpredictable-you do not know when and howT it will take place.

Dalai Lama

If you are mindful of death, it will not come as a surprise-you will not be anxious. You will feel that death is merely like changing clothes. Consequently, at that point you will be able to maintain your calmness of mind.

Dalai Lama

There is no way to escape death, it is just like trying to escape by four great mountains touching sky. There is no escape from these four mountains of birth, old age, sickness and death.

Dalai Lama

We cannot hope to die peacefully if our lives have been full of violence, or if our minds have mostly been agitated by emotions like anger, attachment, or fear. So if we wish to die well, we must learn how to live well: Hoping for a peaceful death, we must cultivate peace in our mind, and in our way of life.

Bertrand Russell

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Thomas Hobbes

Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.

Tana French

We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.

Sylvia Plath

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Sylvia Plath

I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

Rumi

Move, but don't move the way fear makes you move.

Rumi

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Tom Robbins

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.

Steve Lacy

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

Toni Morrison

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Ricardo Montalban

If you shake your fist, the other guy will shake his too. But if you extend your hand to shake their hand, then they will extend theirs also, and you've made a friend.

Robert Louis Stevenson

I had learned to dwell with pleasure as a beloved daydream on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each I told myself could be housed in separate identities life would be relieved of all that was unbearable the unjust might go his way delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path doing the good things in which he found his pleasure and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

Sarah Dessen

I looked down again at the sign in my hand - ENJOY THE RIDE! - and it seemed, suddenly, to be just that. A sign.

Voltaire

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

William Standish Knowles

I was one who liked to work with my hands as well as my brain.

William Styron

I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.

William Powell

There is only one purpose in hand-to-hand combat, and that is to kill. Never face an enemy with the idea of knocking him out. The chances are extremely good that he will kill you.

William Powell

I can fully appreciate the fury and anger that a person can feel when put through a humiliating experience by a cop, but I would recommend strongly that a person maintain his cool, and in no circumstances lose his temper. If you lose your temper, you are playing right into the cop's hands.