Death Instinct Quotes

The anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct. ~ Melanie Klein

I think most generations tend to learn the lesson of war the hard way. There is a deep attraction to the empowerment. Freud is right: societies either become locked in a collective embrace of Eros, as individuals do, or a collective embrace of Thanatos, the death instinct. They swing between the two. The notion that societies are naturally prone toward self-preservation is wrong. Self-annihilation can be deeply addictive, intoxicating, enticing. So I take a darker view of human nature, that war is probably always going to be with us. I think history bears me out. ~ Chris Hedges

Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish. ~ Eugene Ionesco

Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from a contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence. Aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurobiological basis, and their social distribution. ~ Steven Pinker

This association of the idea of the orgasm and the idea of dying is a universal one. On the basis of these typical clinical examples, we arrive at the following conclusion: the striving after non-existence, nirvana, death, is identical with the striving after orgastic release, i.e., the most essential experience of the living organism. Thus, an idea of death stemming from the actual demise of the organism does not and cannot exist, because an idea can reflect only what has already been experienced. No one, however, has ever experienced his or her own death. ~ Wilhelm Reich

When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. ~ Erich Fromm

The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death. ~ Sigmund Freud

There seemed no answer. He wasn't resigned to anything, he hadn't accepted or adjusted to the life he'd been forced into. Yet here he was, eight months after the plague's last victim, nine since he's spoken to another human being, ten since Virginia had died. Here he was with no future and a virtually hopeless present. Still plodding on.
Instinct? Or was he just stupid? Too unimaginative to destroy himself? Why hadn't he done it in the beginning when he was in the very depths? What had impelled him to enclose the house, install a freezer, a generator, an electric stove, a water tank, build a hothouse, a workbench, burn down the houses on each side of his, collect records and books and mountains of canned supplies, even - it was fantastic when you thought about it - even put a fancy mural on the wall?
Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments?
He closed his eyes. Why think, why reason? There was no answer. His continuance was an accident and an attendant bovinity. He was just too dumb to end it all, and that was about the size of it. ~ Richard Matheson

She likes the bad boys the ones that are bad for her. Maggie is SELF-DESTRUCTIVE. She has the love instinct and the death instinct and they are in an eternal cage match inside her head. This ~ Kate Zambreno

Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it]. ~ Dori Laub

Under conditions of a truly human existence, the difference between succumbing to disease at the age of ten, thirty, fifty, or seventy, and dying a "natural" death after a fulfilled life, may well be a difference worth fighting for with all instinctual energy. Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those who die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilization. They also testify to the unredeemable guilt of mankind. Their death arouses the painful awareness that it was unnecessary, that it could be otherwise. It takes all the institutions and values of a repressive order to pacify the bad conscience of this guilt. Once again, the deep connection between the death instinct and the sense of guilt becomes apparent. The silent "professional agreement" with the fact of death and disease is perhaps one of the most widespread expressions of the death instinct -- or, rather, of its social usefulness. In a repressive civilization, death itself becomes an instrument of repression. Whether death is feared as constant threat, or glorified as supreme sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death introduces an element of surrender into life from the beginning -- surrender and submission. It stifles "utopian" efforts. The powers that be have a deep affinity to death; death is a token of unfreedom, of defeat. Theology and philosophy today compete with each other in celebrating death as an existential category: perverting a ~ Herbert Marcuse

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him ~ Jane Goldman

Carmen will always be free. ~ Prosper Merimee

I don't go out and preach because of my desire as much as I go out to fulfill the command of Christ. He said, "Go!" to all of His disciples, and we're to go and witness to Christ by the way we live and by our verbal witness about the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ and about the need to repent and believe. I've never had any doubts about my call. ~ Billy Graham

Then his fingers trembled on her ankle - tightened around her foot. His head shifted, turning toward her. With a growl, she crashed the poker down onto his head. His hand jerked. A gurgling noise arose, not from his throat but from his chest, from deep down, as if he were fighting for something. Struggling. His eyes shifted toward her. Joan raised the poker again. The gurgling stopped - not abruptly but in a final, lingering, prolonged, exhalation of breath. His lungs gradually expelled every last atom of oxygen. ~ Cate Campbell Beatty

Law should be like death, which spares no one. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

We may remain more or less open-minded on the subject of the death penalty, indisposed to commit ourselves, so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. ~ Victor Hugo

This is the first generation to know that the choices we're making have ultimate consequences. It's a time when you either choose life or you choose death ... Going along with the current order means that you're choosing death. ~ Frances Moore Lappe

Karyos's people adopted an ingenious, if somewhat perplexing attitude that life was a circle. Not like Disney's circle of life thing, which was really just a nice way to say, "death is normal, children, so suck it up. ~ Gene Doucette

Anything that ends with death isn't really mind, just the things that pass through a mind. ~ Frederick Lenz

Accidental shooting death, they argue, are just part of the price we pay for freedom ... and besides, that sort of thing would never happen to me; I'm too cool-headed. ~ Stephen King

We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death. ~ May Sarton

Do you have any coffee?' ... 'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I do not believe that a man should be restrained in his daily actions by being afraid of punishment after death or that he should do things only because in this way he will be rewarded after he dies. ~ Albert Einstein

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction. ~ Mary Augusta Ward

There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all! ... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound? ~ Thomas Carlyle

Thus she's discovered the Conradian truth: The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it...You do what you do because it's that or death. ~ Glen Duncan

[Asked, upon the death of her fast friend and sister suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1816-1902), which period of their association she had enjoyed the most:] The days when the struggle was the hardest and the fight the thickest; when the whole world was against us and we had to stand the closer to each other; when I would go to her home and help with the children and the housekeeping through the day and then we would sit up far into the night preparing our ammunition and getting ready to move on the enemy. The years since the rewards began to come have brought no enjoyment like that. ~ Susan B. Anthony

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

We bloomed in Spring. Our bodies are the leaves of God. The apparent seasons of life and death our eyes can suffer; but our souls, dear, I will just say this forthright: they are God Himself, we will never perish until He does. ~ Teresa Of Avila

The Hittites believed that evil spirits lurked around every corner and sought to pollute the living spiritually and physically, and that death carried the greatest risk of pollution to those who touched the corpse ~ Charles River Editors

The purpose of a funeral service is to comfort the living. It is important at a funeral to display excessive grief. This will show others how kind-hearted and loving you are and their improved opinion of you will be very comforting. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Hadie was my everything. She was the only thing I had to look forward to when the one thing I'd looked forward to for so long was death. ~ Komal Kant

Are you willing to nourish your heart with love; then your selfishness will starve to death. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Technicolor makes me look like death warmed over. ~ Bette Davis

Hazel shuddered, remembering her close call with Don that afternoon. If she hadn't moved quickly and snatched that diamond off the road ... She didn't want to think about it. She didn't need another death on her conscience. ~ Rick Riordan

Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Look at Christ on the cross. Think of the challenge that must have been for Him. The agony of betrayal by people He had trusted, and death. And afterward came the resurrection. He proved that no challenge, no matter how great, could end His love for us. ~ Danielle Steel

Having lived among the owning classes, he knew the utter futility of expecting any solution of the wage-squabble. There was no solution, short of death. The only thing was not to care, not to care about the wages.
Yet, if you were poor and wretched, you had to care. Anyhow, it was becoming the only thing they did care about. The care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes. He refused to care about money.
And what then? What did life offer apart from the care of money? Nothing. ~ D.H. Lawrence

He wondered how Nathan felt about the killing. Granted that Richard had struck Bobby with the chisel, nevertheless, he asked, how had Nathan felt about the boy's death? It didn't concern him, Nathan replied. He had no moral beliefs and religion meant nothing to him: he was an atheist. Whatever served an individual's purpose - that was the best guide to conduct. In ~ Simon Baatz

Live to ask. Die to answer. ~ Raheel Farooq

Social media is basically standing at a bucket filled with other people's vomit and you suck the vomit through a straw, and gag and wince at the unbearable taste of other people's vomit. Yet strangely we continue to suck through the straw as if we've never tasted such lovely vomit. And then before you know it you're old and you're grey. And that's the end of you. A lonely death. Your gravestone is marked with the six saddest words:

Social Media Drained My Soul Away

And they all mourn your loss at a budget funeral service while updating their social media statuses on mobile phones apps. And in years to come nobody remembers any of your updates; even those updates that you deep-down believed were going to bring about world peace. The Digital Age is more disposable than nappies and just as full of shit. ~ Rupert Dreyfus

When we play 'Angel of Death', it's actually a 2 and half minutes sing 'til our party starts. That song is pretty much been played traditionally in the end. ~ Kerry King

I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

If I could go back to be shot in place of Avery, I would do so."
"I know," I whisper.
"Not merely that I would do so, I would exalt to do so." She purses her lips, stares into nothing. "In both a dark and a bright way, I would exalt to take that death as my own. ~ Carolyn Crane

Just like the good old days: marching together into the unknown, searching for missing magical weapons and risking painful death. I'd missed my buddies! ~ Rick Riordan

Because I come from such a close family, my natural instinct is to marry and have kids as soon as possible. ~ Nicole Trunfio