43 Suicide Quotes

Did it ever strike you on such a morning as this that drowning would be happiness and peace?

Just think, right now as you read this, some guy somewhere is gettin' ready to hang himself.

I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. And that man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone. If he had committed suicide four years before, it would have been all right.

In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living.

One said of suicide, 'As long as one has brains one should not blow them out.' And another answered, 'But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.'

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.

You realize that suicide's a criminal offense - In less enlightened times they'd have hung you for it.

The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope.

The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of 'Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea a seance.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.

I'm not disparaging suicides when I call them weak, I'm pointing out that anybody who would consider doing a thing like that needs help. I don't think a normal, mentally healthy person commits suicide. Of course, there are exceptions; people who are terminally ill are a different issue. But in the vast majority of cases, suicide is a tragedy that does unbelievable damage to the family and friends the suicide leaves behind. You don't want to encourage people to do such a thing.

Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away...A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.

I went to the doctor because I'd swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. My doctor told me to have a few drinks and get some rest.

The problem is, no one really knows what run-of-the-mill depression is. You'll think somebody has run-of-the-mill depression, and then the next thing you know, they're hanging from a rope. It's hard to tell the difference.

[MTV] won't play A Tout Le Monde because we made a video for that and they're saying that if people see it, that they'll kill themselves. And I'm thinking to myself, you made Kurt Cobain 'Man of the Year', and if anything, he left an indelible last message that the easy way out is to blow your fuckin' head off.

She cast her eyes about her, longing for the earth to open up. Why not end it all? What was holding her back? She was free to act. And she moved forward. 'Do it! Do it!' she ordered herself, peering down at the pavement.

D'ailleurs, le suicide regnait alors a Paris; ne doit-il pas etre le dernier mot des societes incredules?

Sheila Wood: If you're so unhappy Nick, why haven't you killed yourself? Drake: It's too cowardly, and besides, I don't have the courage.

No matter what they say they all intend to live Except the suicides? They intended to live, too. Suicide is a desperate attempt to get rid of unbearable agony.

For they could not love you, but still your love was true And when no hope was left in sight, on that starry starry night You took your life as lovers often do, But I could have told you, Vincent, This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

Tel homme qui dans un exces de melancolie se tue aujourd'hui aimerait a vivre s'il attendait huit jours.

The rational man may talk a good game about suicide, but reason must give way to obsession and finally squalor before he can actually do it.

Way out in Seattle Young Kurt Cobain Snuck out to the greenhouse Put a bullet in his brain.

I once contemplated suicide, and woulda tried/But when I held that 9, all I could see was my momma's eyes

If you're on a luxury cruise ship, and a gentleman passenger commits suicide and jumps off the ship - he didn't fall off, he didn't slip, he didn't trip, it wasn't an accident - he purposely jumped off the side of the cruise ship with the sole intention of ending his life by suicide, do you bring the ship to a dead stop, reverse the screws as they like to say - back up that ship and search for that man, even if it means inconveniencing passengers who had their hearts set on the Dutch Antillies?

There was this boy who played in a rock n' roll band And he wasn't half bad at saving the world She said he could do no right, so he took his life The story is true

Maybe if I put a bullet in my brain They'd remember me like Kurt Cobain And the parasites on MTV Would wipe their eyes and act like they knew me

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance-so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problems was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid... Hopelessness was thinly spread like a drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in.

There are a great many ways to commit suicide you know.

I have an essay with the title 'Eyes in their Last Extremity'. The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued: 'I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity.' Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five. In my essay, 'Eyes in their Last Extremity', I had to say: 'How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint.' I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.

'Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of suicide?' With me was the knowledge that that fellow Ikkyu twice contemplated suicide. I have 'that fellow', because the priest Ikkyu is known even to children as a most amusing person, and because anecdotes about his limitlessly eccentric behavior have come down to us in ample numbers. It is said of him that children climbed his knee to stroke his beard, that wild birds took feed from his hand. It would seem from all this that he was the ultimate in mindlessness, that he was an approachable and gentle sort of priest. As a matter of fact he was the most severe and profound of Zen priests. Said to have been the son of an emperor, he entered a temple at the age of six, and early showed his genius as a poetic prodigy. At the same time he was troubled with the deepest of doubts about religion and life. 'If there is a god, let him help me. If there is none, let me throw myself to the bottom of the lake and become food for fishes.' Leaving behind these words he sought to throw himself into a lake, but was held back. ... He gave his collected poetry the title 'Collection of the Roiling Clouds', and himself used the expression 'Roiling Clouds' as a pen name. In his collection and its successor are poems quite without parallel in the Chinese and especially the Zen poetry of the Japanese middle ages, erotic poems and poems about the secrets of the bedchamber that leave one in utter astonishment. He sought, by eating fish and drinking spirits and having commerce with women, to go beyond the rules and proscriptions of the Zen of his day, and to seek liberation from them, and thus, turning against established religious forms, he sought in the pursuit of Zen the revival and affirmation of the essence of life, of human existence, in a day civil war and moral collapse.