Death Anxiety Quotes

“Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.”
― Irvin Yalom

“As a general rule, the less one’s sense of life fulfillment, the greater one’s death anxiety.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

“The sentiment that one "should have done something more" reflects, it seems to me, an underlying wish to control the uncontrollable. After all, if one is guilty about not having done something that one should have done, then it follows that there is something that could have been done - a comforting thought that decoys us from our pathetic helplessness in the face of death.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“My work is to live before I die.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, A Matter of Death and Life

“Our deep irrational feelings of death anxiety have been attributed to multiple sources. In part, they may arise from evolved self-protection mechanisms or survival responses of being a victim of predators. They might, conversely, stem from unconscious fear (or guilt) of retribution resulting from our own acts of harming or predation. According to existential psychologists, the most powerful form of death anxiety comes from our general ability to anticipate the future, coupled with conscious anticipation of inevitable personal demise.”
― Richard J. Borden, Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective

“We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are imbedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all absorbing activity, passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own centre. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorance of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashion in order to live securely and serenely.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“For some of us the fear of death manifests only indirectly, either as generalized unrest or masqueraded as another psychological symptom; other individuals experience an explicit and conscious stream of anxiety about death; and for some of us the fear of death erupts into terror that negates all happiness and fulfillment.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

“Terap kuram güdümlü değil, ilişki-güdümlü olmalıdır.”
― Irvin D. Yalom

“According to Rosenzweig, the difference between Jewish andChristian believers is not that the latter experience no anxiety, but thatthe focus of anxiety is displaced: Christians experience anxiety in theintimacy of their contact with God (like Abraham?), while for Jews,anxiety arises at the level of the Jews as a collective entity without aproper land, its very existence threatened.6And perhaps we should es-tablish a link here with the weak point of Heidegger’s Being and Time(the
“illegitimate” passage from individual being-toward-death, and as-suming one’s contingent fate, to the historicity of a collective): it is onlyin the case of the Jewish people that such a passage from individual tocollective level would have been “legitimate.”
― zizek

“And, pray tell, what were you before birth?" inquired that brilliant woman. "Several unqualified lumps of unorganized matter as yet without definite form or at least lacking any form you can hope to remember. Well, you're going to turn back into those same or similar lumps of matter, you're going to become the raw material out of which new beings will be fashioned, and this will happen when natural processes bring it about. Shall you find all this pleasurable? No. Shall you suffer? No. Is there anything truly objectionable here? No; and what is he who on earth agrees to sacrifice all his pleasures in exchange for the certitude of never having to undergo pain? What would he be, if he were able to strike this bargain? An inert, motionless being. And after he died, what will he be? Exactly the same thing. What then is the use of fretting, since the law of Nature positively condemns you to the same state you'd gladly accept if you were given the opportunity to choose? Eh, Juliette, have you existed since the beginning of time? No; and does that fact make you grieve and despair? Have you any better cause to despair at the fact that you're not going to exist till the end of time? La, la, calm yourself, my pigeon; the cessation of being affrights only the imagination that has created the execrable dogma of an afterlife.”
― Marquis de Sade, Juliette