Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Death & Dying (10 Quotes)

Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.

In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.

The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true

When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death

The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.