38 Quotes Tagged: Death

Individual asexual organisms die by mistake - when the run out of something, or when they experience a lethal accident. Sexual organisms are designed to die, preprogrammed to do so. Death serves as a poignant reminder of our limitations and frailties - and of the bond with our ancestors who, in a way, died that we might live.

We will die and we fear death. This fear is worldwide and transcultural. It probably has significant survival value. Those who wish to postpone or avoid death can improve the world, reduce its perils, make children who will live after us, and create great works by which they will be remembered.

We might have thought that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were enough to innoculate us against the toxins there revealed and unleashed. But our resistance quickly fades. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties.

For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want – but an end?

In human history there a precious few whose memory we revere because they knowingly sacrificed themselves for others. For each of them, there are multitudes who did nothing.

Bogert's face was bloodless, 'He's dead!' 'No!' Susan Calvin burst into body-racking gusts of wild laughter, 'not dead — merely insane. I confronted him with the insoluble dilemma, and he broke down. You can scrap him now — because he'll never speak again.

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

Death is a state of mind — -many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

There are no ghosts, but up here — she gestured toward her head — it's a haunted house.

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.

All that we have seen is something of a vast and intricate and lovely universe. There is no particular theological conclusion that comes out of an exercise such as the one we have just gone through. What is more, when we understand something of the astronomical dynamics, the evolution of worlds, we recognize that worlds are born and worlds die, they have lifetimes just as humans do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the cosmos if there is a great deal of life.

As a robot I could have lived forever. But I tell you all today I would rather die a man, than live for all eternity as a machine.