Death Confrontation Quotes

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.

It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they've made their peace with death.

The decisive moment in a man’s life is when he decides to confront death.

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

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

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.

If we can't face death, we'll never overcome it. You have to look it straight in the eye. Then you can turn around and walk back out into the light.

You are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death.

Dancing with death meant being committed to killing, committed with your heart and soul.

Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive -- a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?

We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.

When you have a life-threatening illness like cancer, and you're faced with the alternative, it gives doing whatever it is you do a much sweeter taste.

'Death with dignity' is our society's expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms.

Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death, and because she was capable of speaking of those matters with both levity and seriousness. She's my hero because she was a metaphysical adventurer.

Then is it sin to rush into the secret house of death. Ere death dare come to us?

What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?

The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective.

danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.

They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I'll hug his neck.

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

I know death comes. I've seen too much death, young death.

Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world.

You are facing death and danger and competition, but at any moment, you can decide to have a fearless mindset.