I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.
I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.
Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.
And Richard Dawkins
ADDED:
One that I’ve always kept close to my heart and brain (in that I can actually quote it):
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms;
that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave;
that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system,
and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
