He who is not afraid of death, enters a house engulfed in flames; he who is not afraid of death, jumps without hesitation into a turbulent flood; he who is not afraid of death, charges into a dense hail of bullets; he who is not afraid of death, fights unarmed against thousands of armored titans; in summary, he who does not fear death is the only one who can do something for others, bleed for others, and has, at the same time, the only happiness, the only desirable good in this world: undisturbed peace of heart.

He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a man who is alive.

He who fears death will never do anything worth of a man who is alive.

The man who doesn’t fear, doesn’t live long. I fear everything.

He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man.

a man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.

He was not one of those dull-witted, unimaginative men of nerveless meat who were too stupid ever to be afraid

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.

If the fear of death were merely the fear of dying, it would be better dealt with by medicine than by argument. There is, or there might be, an art of dying well, of dying painlessly, willingly, and in season, — as in those noble partings which Attic gravestones depict, — especially if we were allowed, as Lucretius would allow us, to choose our own time.

But the radical fear of death, I venture to think, is something quite different. It is the love of life. Epicurus, who feared life, seems to have missed here the primordial and colossal force he was fighting against. Had he perceived that force, he would have been obliged to meet it in a more radical way, by an enveloping movement, as it were, and an attack from the rear. The love of life is not something rational, or founded on experience of life. It is something antecedent and spontaneous. It is that Venus Genetrix which covers the earth with its flora and fauna. It teaches every animal to seek its food and its mate, and to protect its offspring; as also to resist or fly from all injury to the body, and most of all from threatened death. It is the original impulse by which good is discriminated from evil, and hope from fear.

Nothing could be more futile, therefore, than to marshal arguments against that fear of death which is merely another name for the energy of life, or the tendency to self-preservation. Arguments involve premises, and these premises, in the given case, express some particular form of the love of life; whence it is impossible to conclude that death is in no degree evil and not at all to be feared. For what is most dreaded is not the agony of dying, nor yet the strange impossibility that when we do not exist we should suffer for not existing. What is dreaded is the defeat of a present will directed upon life and its various undertakings. Such a present will cannot be argued away, but it may be weakened by contradictions arising within it, by the irony of experience, or by ascetic discipline.

He wasn’t afraid of dying, only of having not done all he could, and not properly spitting in the eye of death when it came for him. That final gesture was important.

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.

Wretched indeed is the man who in the course of a long life hasn't learned that death is nothing to be feared.

Nobody crossed him without a battle. He disliked almost everything, particularly his wife, his children, his neighbors, his church, his priest, his town, his state, his country, and the country from which he emigrated. Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the sun or the stars, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women.