Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

There are many things which swallow up men's thoughts while they live, which they will think little of when they are dying. Hundreds are wholly absorbed in political schemes and seem to care for nothing but the advancement of their own party. Myriads are buried in business and money matters and seem to neglect everything else but this world.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

Love, life, meaning...over.

He sometimes felt that life was something that had already risen, and all of this, the Jackson Pollack of spring, summer, and fall, the vague refrigeration and tinfoiled sky of wintertime, was just a falling, really, originward, in a kind of correction, as if by spritual gravity, towards the wiser consciousness--or consciousnessless, maybe; could gravity trick itself like that?--of death. It was a kind of movement both very slow and very fast; there was both too much and not enough time to think.

How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential - in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth - when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.

At the end of your life, you cannot take a penny with you. So what is the object of money if you can't take it with you?

No matter how big a house you have or how slick a car you drive, the only thing you can take with you at the end of your life is your conscience.

A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.

You can be distracted by your love life, by the baseball game, movies, by the nonsense. "Can I get my kid into this private school? Can I get this girl to go out with me Saturday night? Am I going to get the promotion in my office?" All this stuff, but in the end the universe burns out. So I think it's completely meaningless.

Human beings are afraid of dying. They are always running after something: money, honor, and pleasure. But if you had to die now, what would you want?

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

Tis the only discipline we are born for; all studies else are but as circular lines, and death the center where they all must meet.

Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

I've passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage. I found that just surviving was a noble fight.

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

Life is nothing unless death has been faced down.

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.

There are so many empty headed people in the fashion business who take themselves way too seriously and I don't think I am at all like one of them. To me there are lots more important things in the world than just having the right shoes!

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me.

All religions are nothing but a science - or an art - to teach you how to die. And the only way to teach you how to die is to teach you how to live. They are not separate. If you know what right living is, you will know what right dying is. So the first thing, or the most fundamental thing is: how to live.

I live to die; better that than to live a lie.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?