Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.

People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

Seize the day, put no trust in tomorrow.

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero!

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely... but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude...

What greater pain could mortals have than this: To see their children dead before their eyes?

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick -- not wounded -- dead.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.