Il existe je ne sais quoi de grand et d’épouvantable dans le suicide. Les chutes d’une multitude de gens sont sans danger, comme celles des enfants qui tombent de trop bas pour se blesser; mais quand un grand homme se brise, il doit venir de bien haut, s’être élevé jusqu’aux cieux, avoir entrevu quelque paradis inaccessible. Implacables doivent être les ouragans qui le forcent à demander la paix de l’âme à la bouche d’un pistolet… Chaque suicide est un poème sublime de mélancolie.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Suicide is a huge folly, because it places the committer of it in an infinitely worse position than he was in under the conditions from which he foolishly hoped to escape. It is not death. It is only a leaving of one well-known house in familiar surroundings to go into a new place where terror and despair alone have place. It is but a preliminary death done to the clay, which is put in the "cold embrace of the grave," leaving the man himself naked and alive, but out of mortal life and not in either heaven or hell.

There is something noble as well as terrible about suicide. The downfall of many men is not dangerous, for they fall like children, too near the ground to do themselves harm. But when a great man breaks, he has soared up to the heavens, espied some inaccessible paradise, and then fallen from a great height. The forces that make him seek peace from the barrel of a gun cannot be placated. How many young talents confined to an attic room wither and perish for lack of a friend, a consoling wife, alone in the midst of a million fellow humans, while throngs of people weary of gold are bored with their possessions.

Si je me tue ce ne sera pas pour me détruire, mais pour me reconstituer, le suicide ne sera pour moi qu’un moyen de me reconquérir violemment, de faire brutalement irruption dans mon être, de devancer l’avance incertaine de Dieu. Par le suicide, je réintroduis mon dessin dans la nature, je donne pour la première fois aux choses la forme de ma volonté.

The problem with suicide is that it seems so flamboyant. It’s camp. You have to be a bit of a drama queen to ever seriously consider it.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate.

…in the first place, self decapitation is an extremely difficult, not to say dangerous, thing to attempt; and, in the second, it’s suicide, and suicide is a capital offence.

D'ailleurs, le suicide régnait alors à Paris ; ne doit-il pas être le dernier mot des sociétés incrédules ?

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

Suicide is generally seen in a very negative way and, though it is tragic and devastating, I've learnt from losing my own twin that there's a positive and magical side to it as well. It's about a person freeing themselves. It is actually a very courageous thing to do. To leave can be braver than to just stay here and struggle on, never knowing whether you'll ever be happy.

If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.

Nothing in life is worth committing suicide over. It is said that when there is life, there is hope. For most people who reached that bridge of almost taking their lives, they eventually thank God that they did not take that plunge. The only thing that is constant is change. You may not have today, but you would have tomorrow.