Discussion Quotes about suicide

[OzymandiAsh]

Mods please move this to off topic if more appropriate.

@anagram was awesome enough to share his Personal Collection of quotes in the Ligature Strangulation thread.

If you know of any more quotes, however indirect, about suicide and death, please feel free to share.

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Personal Collection of Quotes

"Do you see that precipice? That river? That well? Liberty sits at the bottom of them. Do you see that tree? Liberty hangs from its branches. Do you see your own throat, your own neck, your heart? They are so many ways of escape from slavery."
- Seneca


"To think so many have succeeded in dying!"
- Emil Cioran


"No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself"
- Emil Cioran


"Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone."
- Emil Cioran


"When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down."
- Emil Cioran


"This too, shall pass"


"I envy those who are dead and gone; they are better off than those who are still alive. But better off than either are those who have never been born, who have never seen the injustice that goes on in this world."
- Ecclesiastes 4:2-3


"The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night."
- Friedrich Nietzsche


"To be, or not to be? That is the question."
- William Shakespeare


"We thank with brief thanksgiving / Whatever gods may be / That no life lives forever / That the dead rise up never; / That even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea."
- Algernon Charles Swinburne


"A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."
- Franz Kafka


"Sadness and depression are very different things. Sadness is something happens and you temporarily become sad. Depression is a condition where you see things for what they are."
- Drew Michael


"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."
- T.S. Elliot


"The long sleep of death closes our scars, and the short sleep of life our wounds."
- Jean Paul


"Almost anything that consoles us is fake."
- Iris Murdoch


"I remember the Indian proverb: "Better to be seated than standing, better to be lying than seated, but better than all else to be dead "
- Nicolas Chamfort


"A hundred times I wanted to kill myself, but I still loved life. That ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most baneful inclinations: for is there anything more foolish than to wish to carry continually a burden that one can always throw down? To abhor one's existence, and yet to cling to that existence?"
- The Old Woman, in Voltaire's Candide


"A grave is still the best fortification against the storms of destiny."
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


"First, he cast a fearful glance from afar towards death and turned away in fright; then he avoided it; trembling and going around it in wide circles which, however, became smaller and smaller every day until, at last, he clasped death's neck with his weary arms and looked directly into its eyes: and then there was peace, sweet peace."
- Philipp Mainlander

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[kurgan]

Life is an unnecessary interruption from pleasant peaceful non existence.

 

[Ligottian]

Lucky to die before you implore death to come.

- Publius Syrus c. 43 BC

 

[OzymandiAsh]

Lucky to die before you implore death to come.

- Publius Syrus c. 43 BC

That is a great quote!

"This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief."
Rumi (or a translation/interpretation of Rumi by Coleman Banks)

 

[nonabas]

While these quotes are not directly about suicide, they can inform the way that we think about suicide by arguing that death is not something to fear.

"Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not, and when death comes, we are not." – Epicurus

"So too at death the world does not change, but ceases to exist. Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the same way that our visual field has no limit." – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.431-6.4311

"[Death] tends to be either too early or too late...If that is any sort of dilemma, it can, as things still are and if one is exceptionally lucky, be resolved, not by doing anything, but just by dying shortly before the horrors of not doing so become evident. Technical progress may, in more than one direction, make that piece of luck rarer. But as things are, it is possible to be felix opportunitate mortis - as it can be appropriately mistranslated, lucky in having the chance to die." – Bernard Williams, "The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality" in Problems of the Self

 

[OzymandiAsh]

While these quotes are not directly about suicide, they can inform the way that we think about suicide by arguing that death is not something to fear.

"Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not, and when death comes, we are not." – Epicurus

"So too at death the world does not alter, but ceases to exist. Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the same way that our visual field has no limits." – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.431-6.4311

"[Death] tends to be either too early or too late...If that is any sort of dilemma, it can, as things still are and if one is exceptionally lucky, be resolved, not by doing anything, but just by dying shortly before the horrors of not doing so become evident. Technical progress may, in more than one direction, make that piece of luck rarer. But as things are, it is possible to be felix opportunitate mortis - as it can be appropriately mistranslated, lucky in having the chance to die." – Bernard Williams, "The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality" in Problems of the Self

Welcome to the forum! Impressive first post.

I recognise the Epicurus quote from the film Gladiator II.

 

[TheEmptyVoid]

My favorite quote:

"The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

 

[ginko0]

Some of my favorites. I recommend everyone to read "Suicide" by Edouard Levé. It's a book he wrote some months before killing himself and it really spoke to me.

"The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint." — Montaigne

"We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to." — Emil Cioran

"When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of "saving" the suicidal is based on a hairrasing misapprehension of the nature of existence." — Petter Zappfe

"The life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster" — David Hume

"This selfishness of your suicide displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life's painful commotion" — Edouard Levé

"Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities." — Edouard Levé