people can die of mere imagination

Every thought that is born has to die. It is what they call the death wish. If a thought does not die, it cannot be reborn. It has to die, and with it you die. But you don’t die with each thought and breath. You hook up each thought with the next, creating a false continuity. It is that continuity that is the problem.

If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

Kill the body and the head will die.

Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

That's the way it is. The intelligence of the mind can't think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can't think of any reason to die

And what does it mean — dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

belief is the death of intelligence.

For to be in one's right mind causes grief: but madness is an ill; yet it is better to perish, nothing knowing of one's ills.

Mind is reality. with one thought you can be in heaven, with another, in hell.

Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement.