Blaise Pascal Quotes

Death is just around the corner. If only it would stay there.

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.

It doesn't take that many years for a kid to realise that they're going to die. It's always there in the back of their mind the rest of their lives.

In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.

The Fear of Death often proves Mortal.

L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.

Change the emphasis, turn your attention around. If you become concerned with death, your life comes to be revealed to you for the first time, because the moment you become at ease with death you have gained a life that cannot die. The moment you have known death, you have known that life which is eternal.

Death happens but once, yet we feel it every moment of our lives; it is worse to dread it than to suffer it.

The first thing I think of when I wake up is how close I am to death. But then it gets better during the day.

It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.

Would it hurt to die? All those times he had thought it was about to happen and escaped, he had never really thought of the thing itself: his will to live had always been so much stronger than his fear of death.

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

I have no fear of death whatsoever. I suspect that few people do, what they all fear is what might happen in the years or months before death.

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

I got this feeling I'm gonna die before I get old. I don't know why. I just have this feeling.

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.

The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.

Mortality applies to every aspect of life. The fear of death is the driving fear of life.

The fear of death comes from limited awareness.

I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal.

Most people come to fear not death itself, but the many terrible ways of dying.

People assume that death hanging over my head would allow me to put things into perspective, but that's not how it works.