Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Death is the release from all pain and complete cessation, beyond which our suffering will not follow. It will return us to that condition of tranquility, which we had enjoyed before we were born. Should anyone mourn the deceased, then he must also mourn the unborn.

Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows. Plato's famous account of the trial and death of Socrates.

I have no fear of losing my life. If I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it.

If my life is to be prolonged now, I know that I must live out my old age, seeing worse, hearing less, learning with more difficulty, and forgetting more and more of what I have learned. If I see myself growing worse and reproach myself for it, tell me, how could I continue to live pleasantly? Perhaps even the god in his kindness is offering to end my life not only at the right time, but also in the easiest way possible... Plato's famous account of the trial and death of Socrates.

I'm one of those people who believes that if I'm very good in this life I'll go to France when I die.

Like everyone else you want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose — to accept defeat. To learn to die is to be liberated from it. So when tomorrow comes you must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying!

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Letter to the family of his lifelong friend Michele Besso, after learning of his death, (March 1955).

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm in them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.