Suicide quotes
1.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside suicide — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it."
"Syria is descending into suicide. It's a horror story and getting worse and worse. There's no bright spot on the horizon. What will probably happen, if this continues, is that Syria will be partitioned into probably three regions; a Kurdish region - which is already forming - that could pull out and join in some fashion the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, maybe with some kind of deal with Turkey."
"And should men name me dead, I beg ye, say "Nay, he but wearied here, and went away."
"Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treelesswaste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers."
"Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,--the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts' shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?"
"These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man's acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It is the best news that America has ever heard.... How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for!"
"One's worst enormities remain within, and it is only one's vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides, treasons, infidelities, and betrayals."
"A man with an excruciatingly painful condition wrote me and told me that his doctor said that the only cure for what he has is death, and he might want to consider suicide. What do you say to him? I doubt the, "Hey let's go get some coffee and talk" thing is going to be at all helpful."
""State," I call it, where they all drink poison, the good and the wicked; "state," where they all lose themselves, the good and the wicked; "state," where they all call their slow suicide-"life.""
"The relatives of a suicide hold it against him that out of consideration for their reputation he did not remain alive."
"Woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. Oh, there are some who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of the absolute truth; there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life. And they will burn in the fire of their own wrath forever and yearn for death and annihilation. But they will not attain to death."
"I saw a study the other day showing that some atypical anti-psychotic was at least as good as mood stabilizers in preventing suicide. It's a very good thing to decrease suicide but we should care at least a little if I'm not killing myself because I feel better or if I just can't remember where I put the damn gun."
"The society that destroys its children is eating its own tail, committing suicide in the most perverse way."
"You are certainly wrong to compare suicide ... with great accomplishments, since it cannot be considered as anything but a weakness. After all, it is easier to die than to endure a harrowing life with fortitude."
"... I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go."
"When you're thirty-five, you can't take as much booze ... and I always got a little violent on drink...So it was kind of self-destructive suicide side of me, which is resolving itself for the better, I believe, because I never enjoyed it."
"(Suicide) takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell."
"Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day."
"I just couldn't go back to Suddenly Susan after David Strickland's suicide. I didn't see how we could make the show light and funny any more."
"I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life."
