Philosopher Quotes on Death

Empedocles on Death

c. 490 BC – c. 430 BC · Greek

• “I have already once been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a mute fish in the sea.”

  ἤδη γάρ ποτ’ ἐγὼ γενόμην κοῦρός τε κόρη τε θάμνος τ’ οἰωνός τε καὶ ἔξαλος ἔλλοπος ἰχθύς.

• “Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus, [ 2 ] and Nestis, [ 3 ] who wets with tears the mortal wellspring.”

  τέσσαρα γὰρ πάντων ῥιζώματα πρῶτον ἄκουε· Ζεὺς ἀργὴς Ἥρη τε φερέσβιος ἠδ’ Ἀιδωνεύς Νῆστίς θ’, ἥ δακρύοις τέγγει κρούνωμα βρότειον.

• “And I will tell you something else: there is no birth of all mortal things, nor any end in wretched death, but only a mixing and dissolution of mixtures ; 'birth' is so called on the part of mankind.”

  ἄλλο δέ τοι ἐρέω· φύσις οὐδενός ἐστιν ἁπάντων θνητῶν, οὐδέ τις οὐλομένου θανάτοιο τελευτή, ἀλλὰ μόνον μίξις τε διάλλαξίς τε μιγέντων ἐστί, φύσις δ’ἐπὶ τοῖς ὀνομάζεται ἀνθρώποισιν.

• “But, when the elements have been mingled in the fashion of a man and come to the light of day, or in the fashion of the race of wild beasts or plants or birds, then men say that these come into being; and when they are separated, they call that woeful death . They call it not aright; but I too follow the custom, and call it so myself.”

  οἱ δ᾿ ὅτε μὲν κατὰ φῶτα μιγέντ᾿ εἰς αἰθέρ᾿ ἵ⟨κωνται⟩ ἢ κατὰ θηρῶν ἀγροτέρων γένος ἢ κατὰ θάμνων ἠὲ κατ᾿ οἰωνῶν, τότε μὲν τὸ ⟨λέγουσι⟩ γενέσθαι, εὖτε δ᾿ ἀποκρινθῶσι, τὸ δ᾿ αὖ δυσδαίμονα πότμον· ἥ θέμις ⟨οὐ⟩ καλέουσι, νόμωι δ᾿ ἐπίφημι καὶ αὐτός.

• Attributed to Empedocles:

  “There is no birth in mortal things, nor any end in ruinous death; there is only mingling and interchange of what is mingled.”

Read all 5 Empedocles quotes on Death →

Nikolai Fyodorov on Death

1829 – 1903 · Russian

• “[The] transformation of the blind course of nature into one that is rational [...] is bound to appear to the learned as a disruption of order, although this order of theirs brings only disorder among men, striking them down with famine, plague, and death.”

  Quoted by Ed Tandy in " N.F. Fedorov, Russian Come-Upist

• “How unnatural it is to ask, ‘Why does that which exist, exist?' and yet how completely natural it is to ask, ‘Why do the living die?”

  Quoted by Ed Tandy in " N.F. Fedorov, Russian Come-Upist

• “The problem of the force which brings the two sexes to unite and give birth to a third being is also a problem of death.”

  Part I, § 9, p. 43

• Attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov:

  “The common task of humanity is the conquest of death.”

• Attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov:

  “Science must serve the resurrection of the dead, not the destruction of the living.”

Read all 5 Nikolai Fyodorov quotes on Death →

Albert Camus on Death

1913 – 1960 · French

• “Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death "He is going to pay his debt to society ," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye .”

  Entre oui et non" in L'Envers et l'endroit (1937), translated as "Between Yes and No", in World Review magazine (March 1950), also quoted in The Artist and Political Vision (1982) by Benjamin R. Barber and Michael J. Gargas McGrath

• “We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage. A Happy Death (written 1938), first published as La mort heureuse (1971), as translated by Richard Howard (1972)”

  Nous nous trompons toujours deux fois sur ceux que nous aimons: d'abord à leur avantage, puis à leur désavantage.

• “Said at the Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg (1948); reported in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (translation by Justin O'Brien, 1961), p. 73”

  Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

• Attributed to Albert Camus:

  “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

Read all 4 Albert Camus quotes on Death →

Georges Bataille on Death

1897 – 1962 · French

• “Today, I am overjoyed at being an object of horror and repugnance to the one being whom I am bound to... The blank head in which ‘I’ am has become so frightened and greedy that only my death could satisfy it.”

  Wikiquote

• “I sank into the moist body the way a well-guided plough sinks into earth. The earth beneath that body lay open like a grave; her naked cleft lay open to me like a freshly dug grave... our bodies were quivering like two rows of teeth chattering together.”

  Wikiquote

• Attributed to Georges Bataille:

  “Sovereignty is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would impose.”

• Attributed to Georges Bataille:

  “Eroticism is the assenting to life up to the point of death.”

Read all 4 Georges Bataille quotes on Death →

Giorgio Agamben on Death

b. 1942 · Italian

• “God didn't die, he was transformed into money.”

  As quoted in "God didn't die, he was transformed into money" - An interview with Giorgio Agamben - Peppe Savà , libcom.org .

• “As quoted in "God didn't die, he was transformed into money" - An interview with Giorgio Agamben - Peppe Savà , libcom.org .”

  God didn't die, he was transformed into money.

• Attributed to Giorgio Agamben:

  “Bare life is life exposed to death without the protection of any political form.”

• Attributed to Giorgio Agamben:

  “The camp is the nomos of the modern.”

Read all 4 Giorgio Agamben quotes on Death →

Epicurus on Death

341 BC – 270 BC · Greek

• “Don't fear god , Don't worry about death ; What is good is easy to get, and What is terrible is easy to endure. (tr. D. S. Hutchinson, 1994 ) The Tetrapharmakos , or "four-part cure", a summary of the first four Principal Doctrines . Composed by an unidentified Epicurean philosopher ( Usener 1887:69 ); reported by Philodemus , P.Herc. 1005, IV.10–14.”

  ἄφοβον ὁ θεός, ἀνύποπτον ὁ θάνατος, καὶ τἀγαθὸν μὲν εὔκτητον, τὸ δὲ δεινὸν εὐεκκαρτέρητον.

• “Death , therefore, the most awful of evils , is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

  τὸ φρικωδέστατον οὖν τῶν κακῶν ὁ θάνατος οὐθὲν πρὸς ἡμᾶς͵ ἐπειδήπερ ὅταν μὲν ἡμεῖς ὦμεν͵ ὁ θάνατος οὐ πάρεστιν͵ ὅταν δὲ ὁ θάνατος παρῇ͵ τόθ΄ ἡμεῖς οὐκ ἐσμέν.

• Attributed to Epicurus:

  “Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”

Martin Heidegger on Death

1889 – 1976 · German

• “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? Das ist die Frage.”

  Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question. | What is Metaphysics? (1929), p. 110 | Cf. Gottfried Leibniz , De rerum originatione radicali (1697)ː " cur aliquid potius extiterit quam nihil .

• Attributed to Martin Heidegger:

  “Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”

• Attributed to Martin Heidegger:

  “Being-toward-death is essentially anxiety.”

Susan Sontag on Death

1933 – 2004 · American

• “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.”

  Illness As Metaphor (1978), foreword, p. 3, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-374-52073-9

• Attributed to Susan Sontag:

  “All photographs are memento mori.”

• Attributed to Susan Sontag:

  “What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.”

Friedrich Schelling on Death

1775 – 1854 · German

• “Wie zugleich die objektive Welt nach Vorstellungen in uns, und Vorstellungen in uns nach der objektiven Welt sich bequemen, ist nicht zu begreifen, wenn nicht zwischen den beiden Welten, der ideellen und der reellen, eine vorherbestimmte Harmonie existiert. Diese vorherbestimmte Harmonie aber ist selbst nicht denkbar, wenn nicht die Tätigkeit, durch welche die objektive Welt produziert ist, ursprünglich identisch ist mit der, welche im Wollen sich äußert, und umgekehrt.”

  How both the objective world accommodates to presentations in us, and presentations in us to the objective world, is unintelligible unless between the two worlds, the ideal and the real, there exists a pre-determined harmony . But this latter is itself unthinkable unless the activity, whereby the objective world, is produced, is at bottom identical with that which expresses itself in volition, and

• “Alle Regeln, die man dem Studieren vorschreiben könnte, fassen sich in der einen zusammen: Lerne nur, um selbst zu schaffen.”

  All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create. | On University Studies (1803), Third Lecture . Cited by Patrick Dunleavy, Authoring a PhD (Basingstoke: Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. vi.

• “Die Scheu vor der Spekulation, das angebliche Forteilen vom bloß Theoretischen zum Praktischen, bewirkt im Handeln notwendig die gleiche Flachheit wie im Wissen. Das Studium einer streng theoretischen Philosophie macht uns am unmittelbarsten mit Ideen vertraut, und nur Ideen geben dem Handeln Nachdruck und sittliche Bedeutung.”

  The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge . It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with vigour and ethical meaning. | Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums ( Seventh Lecture ), Friedric

Friedrich Schiller on Death

1759 – 1805 · German

• “Die Räuber (The Robbers) , Act II (1781)”

  I feel an army in my fist.

• “Die Verschwörung des Fiesco (The Conspiracy of Fiesco) , Act I, sc. vii (1783)”

  The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.

• “Die Verschwörung des Fiesco (The Conspiracy of Fiesco) , Act I, sc. xviii (1783)”

  Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn't roar?

Bion of Borysthenes on Death

c. 325 BC – c. 250 BC · Greek

• “Boys throw stones at frogs in fun, but the frogs do not die in fun, but in earnest.”

  Variant translation: Boys throw stones at frogs for fun, but the frogs don't die for "fun", but in sober earnest. | As quoted by Plutarch , Moralia , xii. 66

• “Variant translation: Boys throw stones at frogs for fun, but the frogs don't die for "fun", but in sober earnest.”

  Boys throw stones at frogs in fun, but the frogs do not die in fun, but in earnest.

• Attributed to Bion of Borysthenes:

  “The road to Hades is easy; one can travel it with one's eyes shut.”

Crantor on Death

c. 340 BC – c. 275 BC · Greek

• Attributed to Crantor:

  “We are not the first to suffer; we will not be the last.”

• Attributed to Crantor:

  “Time is the gentle physician of grief.”

• Attributed to Crantor:

  “Grief shared with friends is grief lessened.”

Lev Shestov on Death

1866 – 1938 · Russian

• “One of the outstanding examples of the unfree character of modern philosophical thought is perhaps the famous dispute between Hume and Kant. Kant often declared that Hume had awakened him out of “dogmatic slumber.” And in fact, when we read Hume and those passages of Kant in which he appeals to Hume, we might think that this could not be otherwise, and that what Hume saw and what was visible to Kant also, after Hume, must have awakened not only a sleeper, but even a dead man. Foreword p. xlv”

  Wikiquote

• “What can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead? “Justice” should insist that this knowledge or this ignorance should be the prerogative of every human being. p. 3”

  Wikiquote

• “Suppose Euripides is right, and that indeed no one can be sure whether life is not death and death life; can this truth ever become certain? If all men daily repeated Euripides’ words when they got up and when they went to bed, they would remain as strange and as problematic as on the day when the poet first heard them in the depths of his soul. P. 6”

  Wikiquote

Werner Heisenberg on Death

1901 – 1976 · German

• “Die Quantentheorie ist so ein wunderbares Beispiel dafür, daß man einen Sachverhalt in völliger Klarheit verstanden haben kann und gleichzeitig doch weiß, daß man nur in Bildern und Gleichnissen von ihm reden kann.”

  Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables .

• “Der Teil und das Ganze. Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (1969); also in "Kein Chaos, aus dem nicht wieder Ordnung würde", Die Zeit No. 34 (22 August 1969) ; as translated in Physics and Beyond : Encounters and Conversation (1971)”

  Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables .

• “Ein Fachmann ist ein Mann, der einige der gröbsten Fehler kennt, die man in dem betreffenden Fach machen kann, und der sie deshalb zu vermeiden versteht.”

  An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo on Death

1659 – 1719 · Japanese

• “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.”

  Hagakure

• “Commentary on the tale of The Forty-Seven Samurai (or the "Forty-seven Ronin ", or Akō Rōshi , the Akō "vendetta"), emphasizing his view that Bushido demands prompt action, and not delay, or concern about success and failure. Variant: "What if, nine months after Asano's death, Kira had died of an illness?”

  Concerning the night assault of Lord Asano's ronin, the fact that they did not commit seppuku at the Sengakuji was an error, for there was a long delay between the time their lord was struck down and the time when they struck down the enemy. If Lord Kira had died of illness within that period, it would have been extremely regrettable.

• Attributed to Yamamoto Tsunetomo:

  “The way of the samurai is found in death.”

Damascius on Death

458 AD – 538 AD · Syrian-Greek

• “J. A. Symonds Jr., "Epitaph of a Slave", Studies of the Greek Poets (1873), p. 357: She who was once but in her flesh a slave Hath for her flesh found freedom in the grave.”

  Ζωσίμη ἡ πρὶν ἐοῦσα μόνῳ τῷ σώματι δούλη καὶ τῷ σώματι νῦν εὗρεν ἐλευθερίην.

• “Earl of Cromer , "Freedom in Death", Paraphrases and Translations from the Greek (1903), p. 61: Zosime, cursed with serfdom from the womb, Found Life in Death, and freedom in the tomb.”

  Ζωσίμη ἡ πρὶν ἐοῦσα μόνῳ τῷ σώματι δούλη καὶ τῷ σώματι νῦν εὗρεν ἐλευθερίην.

• “G. B. Grundy, "Free Among the Dead", Ancient Gems in Modern Settings (1913), p. 295: She, when she lived, in nought but body was a slave; But when she died her body too found freedom in the grave.”

  Ζωσίμη ἡ πρὶν ἐοῦσα μόνῳ τῷ σώματι δούλη καὶ τῷ σώματι νῦν εὗρεν ἐλευθερίην.

Achille Mbembe on Death

b. 1957 · Cameroonian

• “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”

  Necropolitics," as translated by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture , Volume 15, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 11-40

• Attributed to Achille Mbembe:

  “Necropolitics is the work of death within the body politic.”

• Attributed to Achille Mbembe:

  “Sovereignty is increasingly defined by the power to decide who may live and who must die.”

Plato on Death

428 BC – 348 BC · Greek

• “It is impossible that evils should be done away with, for there must always be something opposed to the good; and they… must inevitably hover about mortal nature and this earth. Therefore we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible… God is in no wise and in no manner unrighteous, but utterly and perfectly righteous, and there is nothing so like him as that one of us who in turn becomes most nearly perfect in righteousness.”

  176a–c

• Attributed to Plato:

  “Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”

Soren Kierkegaard on Death

1813 – 1855 · Danish

• “What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”

  Journal entry, Gilleleie (1 August 1835) Journals 1A; this is considered to be one of the earliest statements of existentialist thought. | Variant translation: My focus should be on what I do in life, not knowing everything, excluding knowledge on what you do. The is key to find a purpose, whatever it truly is that God wills me to do; it's crucial to find a truth which is true to me, to find the i

• “Variant translation: My focus should be on what I do in life, not knowing everything, excluding knowledge on what you do. The is key to find a purpose, whatever it truly is that God wills me to do; it's crucial to find a truth which is true to me, to find the idea which I am willing to live and die for.”

  What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

Socrates on Death

470 BC – 399 BC · Greek

• Attributed to Socrates:

  “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”

• Attributed to Socrates:

  “Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.”

Arthur Schopenhauer on Death

1788 – 1860 · German

• “Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”

  Jede Trennung gibt einen Vorgeschmack des Todes und jedes Wiedersehen einen Vorgeschmack der Auferstehung.

• Attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer:

  “After your death you will be what you were before your birth.”

Simone de Beauvoir on Death

1908 – 1986 · French

• “On her work All Men are Mortal in Force of Circumstances (1963), p. 73”

  The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.

• “There is no such thing as a natural death : nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die; but for every man his death is an accident and even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”

  Il n'y a pas de mort naturelle: rien de ce qui arrive à l'homme n'est jamais naturel puisque sa présence met le monde en question. Tous les hommes sont mortels: mais pour chaque homme sa mort est un accident et, même s'il la connaît et y consent, une violence indue.

Walter Benjamin on Death

1892 – 1940 · German

• “Zur Verknechtung der Sprache im Geschwätz tritt die Verknechtung der Dinge in der Narretei fast als deren unausbleibliche Folge .”

  The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence. "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916), translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), p. 72

• Attributed to Walter Benjamin:

  “The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.”

Bonaventure on Death

1221 – 1274 · Italian

• “It will avail a man little to have been a religious, to have been patient and humble, devout and chaste, to have loved God and to have exercised himself in all the virtues, if he continues not to the end. He must persevere to win the crown. In the race of the spiritual life all the virtues run, but only perseverance “receives the prize” (1 Cor. 9:24.) It is not the beginner in virtue but “he that shall persevere unto the end that shall be saved” (Matt 10: 22.) “What is the use of seeds sprouting if afterwards they wither and die?” None whatever!”

  Wikiquote

• “Christ’s death on the Cross should live in our thoughts and imagination, for frequent thought on the Passion of Christ keeps aflame and brings to intense heat the fires of earnest piety.”

  Wikiquote

Denis Diderot on Death

1713 – 1784 · French

• “Dying words of Nicholas Saunderson as portrayed in Lettre sur les aveugles [ Letter on the Blind ] (1749)”

  What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration

• “When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz , one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.”

  Oeuvres complètes , vol. 7, p. 678