I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

The Thought of Death. It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life- loving people! How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling companion stands behind him! It is always as in the last moment before the departure of an emigrant- ship: people have more than ever to say to one another, the hour presses, the ocean with its lonely silence waits impatiently behind all the noise-so greedy, so certain of its prey! And all, all, suppose that the past has been nothing, or a small matter, that the near future is everything: hence this haste, this crying, this self-deafening and self-overreaching! Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life to us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility. And so we will believe in our even a hundred times more worthy of their attention.

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling.

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death — but it's more peaceful.

A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

Yes, death is far less dire to contemplate
Than a forced marriage to an unloved mate

Death is not the worst thing; rather, when one who craves death cannot attain even that wish.

Then I call on Death
as to a sweet and gentle refuge:
and I say: 'Come to me' with such love,
that I am envious of all who die

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.

If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times.

I had changed, and the sign of it was only that my own death seemed to me by far the least important thing in my life.

Death is not dreadful or else it would have appeared dreadful to Socrates.