Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.

We know that death never skips or spares anybody and that no one ever returns. And yet we go on like the blind, who see as little at midday as in the pitch-dark night. We do not take these examples to heart; we do not realize that today or tomorrow our turn will come.

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.

Everyone knows they re going to die,' he said again, 'but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.

Life could do nothing for her, beyond giving time for a better preparation for death.

Before old age I took care to live well; in old age I take care to die well; but to die well is to die willingly.

To be cliché, death is a part of life and it's going to happen to all of us. I have the blessing of getting a little bit of advance notice and I am able to optimize my use of time down the home stretch.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for.

This is the simplest of all thoughts, that Death must come when we call, although he is a god.

and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

When death comes, he respects neither age nor merit. He sweeps from the earthly existence the sick and the strong, the rich and the poor, and should teach us to live to be prepared for death.

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere." "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

You have to learn to do everything, even to die.

I am not in the least surprised that your impression of death becomes more lively, in proportion as age and infirmity bring it nearer. God makes use of this rough trial to undeceive us in respect to our courage, to make us feel our weakness, and to keep us in all humility in His hands.

When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, "There ought not to be winter." That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible.

You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clearheaded. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

To my ninth decade I have totter'd on, And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady; She, who once led me where she would, is gone, So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready.

Never fear Death for you will feel aroused by his sleep. Never cheat death or he will slap you with a sentence of misery for the defeat.

He will live ill who does not know how to die well.