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20 Positive Death Quotes – including the “secret” Betty White now knows.

Death is often listed as people’s top fear, and yet many of the wisest people don’t fear death at all. In fact, they approach death with humor, good spirits, even a sense of expectation.

Here are 20 quotes about death from authors, celebrities, and philosophers, framing death as a positive (or at least not a negative).

Death Quote: "I think of death as some delightful journey that I shall take when all my tasks are complete." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Death quote: Death is but the next great adventure - J.M. Barrie
Death quotes: The greatest tragedy in life is not death, but a life without purpose. - Myles Munroe
Death quote: It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live. - Marcus Aurelius
Death quote: I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. - Mark Twain
Death quotes: Don't neglect life by worrying about death. - I don't know what is the meaning of death, but I am not afraid to die - and I go on, non-stop, going forward. - Bruce Lee
Death quote: What a more beautiful world this would be if we didn't wait til people were dead before we honored their spirit. - Kellie Elmore
Death quotes: My mother had the most wonderful outlook on death... Growing up, whenever we'd lose somebody, [my mother] would always say, "Now they know the secret." - Betty White
Death quote: To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. - J.K. Rowling
Was she paraphrasing J.M. Barrie? I guess we won’t know.
Death quote: No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away. - Sir Terry Pratchett
Death quote: We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will. - Chuck Palahniuk
Death quote: One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death. - Alfred Hitchcock
Death quote: The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live. - Norman Cousins
Death quote: I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens. - Woody Allen
Death quote: Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. - Henry David Thoreau
Death quote: Unable are the loved to die... For love is immortality. - Emily Dickinson
Death quotes: Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other. - Leo Buscalia
Death quote: For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one. - Kahlil Gibran
Death quote: Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal. - Benjamin Franklin
Death quote: Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean. - David Searls

Author

Erin McCune