Life and death are conventionally seen as opposites

• Thus, flexibility, as displayed by water, is a sign of life. Rigidity, its opposite, is an indicator of death. Anthony Lawlor
• Life found itself alive and somehow knew its opposite was death. We are ever being born, or dying, and the thrill of choosing is ours. Only once, must we be born without our own consent. Only once, must we die without our own permission.Calvin Miller
• Look, I don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive you’ve got to flap your arms and legs, you’ve got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you’re not alive. Mel Brooks
• The truth is all around you, plain to behold. The night is dark and full of terrors, the day bright and beautiful and full of hope. One is black, the other white. There is ice and there is fire. Hate and love. Bitter and sweet. Male and female. Pain and pleasure. Winter and summer. Evil and good. Death and life. Everywhere, opposites. George R. R. Martin
• Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth? Ursula K. Le Guin
• I think that light and shadow have exactly the same duality that exists between life and death. Manuel Alvarez Bravo
• The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites – day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. Carl Jung

.

However, life and death as opposites is an illusion (maya)

• Every explicit duality is an implicit unity. Alan Watts
• Duality is always secretly unity. Alan Watts
• The phenomenal world operates under maya, the law of duality or oppositional states; it is thus an unreal world that veils the truth of the Divine Oneness and Unchangeableness. Man in his mortal aspect dreams of dualities and contrasts—life and death, health and disease, happiness and sorrow; but when he awakens in soul consciousness all dualities disappear and he knows himself as the eternal and blissful Spirit. Paramahansa Yogananda
• Can you dissolve your ego? Can you abandon the idea of self and other? Can you relinquish the notions of male and female, short and long, life and death? Can you let go of all these dualities and embrace the Tao without skepticism or panic? If so, you can reach the heart of the Integral Oneness. Lao Tzu

.

Death is not the opposite of life

• Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it. Haruki Murakami
• Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Robin Hobb
• Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. Death is the opposite of birth. Eckhart Tolle
• Death is not the opposite of life but a natural part of it. Together, life and death are an inseparable unity. Anthony Lambert
• Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. Haruki Murakami
• Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make. Robin Hobb
• The opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Elie Wiesel
• Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life. Mahmoud Darwish
• Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal. Eckhart Tolle
• How can we call death-about which we know nothing- the opposite of life, when we barely comprehend life itself? David Mazzucchelli
• Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. Friedrich Nietzsche

.

Death is an integral part of life

• Death is a very important part of life. GG Allin
• All I can say is, death is a part of life. Simon Kinberg
• Death is a part of life, and eventually I assimilated that completely. James Toback
• Death is not the opposite of death but an inseparable part of life. Anthony Lambert
• Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself. Havelock Ellis
• Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. YODA
• Death is a part of life … and that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does. Jok Church
• Don’t you be afraid, sweetheart. Death is just a part of life, something we’re all destined to do. Sally Field
• People say that death is a part of life and there must be something to it, but I just see it as bad news and I want everybody to stop sugarcoating it. Woody Allen
• To be cliché, death is a part of life and it’s going to happen to all of us. I have the blessing of getting a little bit of advance notice and I am able to optimize my use of time down the home stretch. Randy Pausch
• Life is neither linear nor stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. Rachel Naomi Remen
• It is important to look at death because it is a part of life. It is a sad thing, melancholy but romantic at the same time. It is the end of a cycle – everything has to end. The cycle of life is positive because it gives room for new things. Alexander McQueen
• Death is not the opposite of life, it is a part of life. A part we’ve not yet explored and thus do not understand and it if only natural to fear what we do not understand. But with the right attitude we can make life beautiful. With this same attitude, can death not be the same? We almost always see only what’s wrong with other people and not what’s wrong with us. Joyce Meyer
• What is Death? Death is the ending of life. When people die, their bodies stop working. The heart stops beating and the brain stops functioning. People have always wanted to learn the secret of living forever. In ancient times, explorers and scientists searched for the secret of eternal life. The truth is, nothing can live forever. Everyone and everything will die in time. Plants, animals, and people all die. Death is a natural part of life. Joanne Mattern
• By ‘coming to terms with life’ I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it. Etty Hillesum
• Death is just another stage of life, although the one you kind of hope comes last. Robert Breault
• Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love. How had I missed that? How does anyone miss that? Love is our only weapon. Only love can turn mere life into a miracle, and draw precious meaning from suffering and fear. Nando Parrado
• What is Death? Death is the ending of life. When people die, their bodies stop working. The heart stops beating and the brain stops functioning. People have always wanted to learn the secret of living forever. In ancient times, explorers and scientists searched for the secret of eternal life. The truth is, nothing can live forever. Everyone and everything will die in time. Plants, animals, and people all die. Death is a natural part of life. Joanne Mattern
• Death is a part of all our lives. Whether we like it or not, it is bound to happen. Instead of avoiding thinking about it, it is better to understand its meaning. We all have the same body, the same human flesh, and therefore we will all die. There is a big difference, of course, between natural death and accidental death, but basically death will come sooner or later. If from the beginning your attitude is ‘Yes, death is part of our lives,’ then it may be easier to face. Dalai Lama

.

Life and death are an inseparable unity…

• There is no life without death. Kyle Idleman
• Death is the sleeping partner of life. Eliza Cook
• Life and death make a meaningful whole. Etty Hillesum
• God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.
• For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. Kahlil Gibran
• Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides. Laozi
• Life and death, union and separation, follow hard upon one another. Yoshida Shoin
• Life-and-death. Lifedeath. One event. One short event. Don’t forget. Robert Fulghum
• Life is day and night, life is life and death. You have to be aware of both. Rajneesh
• Who knows but life be that which men call death, / And death what men call life? Euripides
• Death is the inseparable antecedent of life; the seed dies in order to produce the plant… Albert Pike
• Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun. Hilaire Belloc
• Life and death are fused together and there is no evolution, nor destination, there is only BEING. Albert Einstein
• Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another. Annie Besant
• Life and death! They seem like complete opposites-at great enmity with each other. But for all who share our faith-there is a unity. John Piper
• Just as the day cannot exist without the night, just as life cannot exist without death, creativity cannot exist without silence. And vice versa is also true: silence cannot exist without creativity. Rajneesh
• Life and death lived inside each other. That’s what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains. Peter Heller
• Death is by no means separate from life. . . . We all interact with death every day, tasting it as we might a wine, feeling its keen edge even in trifling losses and disappointments, holding it by the hand, as a dancer might a partner, in every separation. Eugene Kennedy
• Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life. John Muir
• Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world. Ruth Ozeki
• That all opposites—such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death—are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say that “ultimate reality is a unity of opposites” is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere. Ken Wilber
• Language creates duality, language exists through duality. It cannot indicate the non-dual. If I say ‘life’, immediately I create death… Once language is no more on your mind and you look directly into reality, day IS night. Suddenly you will start laughing at why you missed it so long! Day, every day turns into night; night turns into day every morning again, and you have been missing. Life is always turning into death, death always turns again into life, and you have been missing. They are not two, they are one whole. This is the non-dual, ADWAITA. This is the most essential religion. Osho

.

…simply two sides of one coin

• Life and death are different sides of the same coin. Neil Gaiman
• Death is the side of life which is turned away from us. Rainer Maria Rilke
• In death the many become one; in life the one become many. Rabindranath Tagore
• I look at everything in terms of polarities – two ends of the same continuum. Young/old, male/female, individuality/conformity, work/play, freedom/constraint, right/left, day/night, life/death, rational/emotional, and so on. Shakti Gawain
• The mystic transcends this realm of intellectual concepts, and in transcending it he becomes aware of the relativity and polar relationship of all opposites. He realizes that good and bad, pleasure and pain, life and death, are not absolute experiences belonging to different categories, but are merely two sides of the same reality; extreme parts of a single whole. The awareness that all opposites are polar, and thus a unity, is seen as one of the highest aims of man in the spiritual traditions of the East. Fritjof Capra
• Evil and good are eternally enjoined, the obverse and the reverse of the same coin. Have one, you have to get the other; make one billow in the ocean and it must be at the cost of some hollow somewhere. Wherever there is evil there must be good, wherever there is life, death must follow it as its shadow, anyone who smiles must have to weep, and whoever weeps must also smile. Vivekananda

.

Life and death are the same thing

• There is no death-the thing that we call death Is but another, sadder name for life, Which is itself an insufficient name, Faint recognition of that unknown life- That Power whose shadow is the Universe. Richard Henry Stoddard
• The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? Edgar Allan Poe
• When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore. Shunryu Suzuki
• When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment. Masao Abe