Harold Bloom Quotes

We don't beat the reaper by living longer, but by living well, and living fully - for the reaper will come for all of us. The question is: what do we do between the time we're born and the time he shows up.

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

All of us want to live, and that is absolutely natural. However, we should learn from childhood on to choose our best way to die. If we don't do that, we end up spending our days like a dog, only in search of harbour, food and expressing a blind loyalty to his owner in return. That isn't enough to make our lives have a meaning.

And remember, that is the criterion. If a person can enjoy and celebrate his death, that shows he has lived rightly; there is no other criterion. Your death will prove how you have lived.

It is very important that you only do what you love to do. you may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do. Otherwise, you will live your life as a prostitute, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived. and you will not have a pleasant death.

Life is not measured by the time we live.

The money, the fame, if that comes, that's fantastic. But at the end of the day, my aim is to go to sleep at night content and have a purpose, and to know that I'm not swapping my life for money and some mind-numbing boring job, making easy money and protecting my brain.

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

The only thing that I am ambitious about is to live a good life. Full stop.

It's the only way that YOUR life is gonna have any value to you. If you're just living the same life that everybody else is living what's the point?

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

By the time I'm old, I'm sure I'll have lived a full enough life. I think we're mortal for a reason. Life gets tiring, man!

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

We already live a very long time for mammals, getting three times as many heartbeats as a mouse or elephant. It never seems enough though, does it?

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.

Everyone dies. It is how one lives that matters.

I'm not afraid of death. That is the greatest mystery of all. That'll be it, that one. But it is all a race against time.

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.