Quotes about death

Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.

— Plutarch

Thank Heaven! the crisis --The danger, is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last --, and the fever called Living is conquered at last.

— Edgar Allan Poe

Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.

— Alexander Pope

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

— Ezra Pound

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

— Marcel Proust

Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.

— Proverb

We come and cry and that is life, we cry and go and that is death.

— Proverb

Death was afraid of him because he had the heart of a lion.

— Arabian Proverb

Life is a dream walking death is a going home.

— Chinese Proverb

Death is a shadow that always follows the body.

— English Proverb

Death always comes too early or too late.

— English Proverb

Our last garment is made without pockets.

— Italian Proverb

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.

— Italian Proverb

Every man goes down to his death bearing in his hands only that which he has given away.

— Persian Proverb

There is a remedy for everything; it is called death.

— Portuguese Proverb

A wooden bed is better than a golden coffin.

— Russian Proverb

It's astonishing how important a man becomes when he dies.

— Yiddish Proverb

I am going to seek a great purpose, draw the curtain, the farce is played.

— Francois Rabelais

O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hath cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!

— Sir Walter Raleigh

I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.

— Ernest Renan

So little done, so much to do.

— Cecil Rhodes

The darkness of death is like the evening twilight; it makes all objects appear more lovely to the dying.

— Jean Paul Richter

Death gives us sleep, eternal youth, and immortality.

— Jean Paul Richter

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

— Andy Rooney

And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.

— Christina Rossetti

Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet; and if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget.

— Christina Rossetti

You just can't complain about being alive. It's self-indulgent to be unhappy. [When asked how she has coped since husband's death.]

— Gena Rowland

Who is mightier than death? Those who can smile when death threatens.

— Ruckett

I died a mineral, and became a plant. I died a plant and rose an animal. I died an animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

— Jalal-Uddin Rumi

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

— John Ruskin

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

— Bertrand Russell

Most people would rather die than think: many do.

— Bertrand Russell

Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.

— A. Sachs

If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction is so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense with it from this moment onward the idea of annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real what we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finish, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter. According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.

— Marquis De Sade

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.

— Antoine De Saint-Exupery

One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.

— George Sand

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

— George Santayana

What shall he fear that does not fear death.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

That which is so universal as death must be a benefit.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

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

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Come he slow or come he fast. It is but death who comes at last.

— Sir Walter Scott

Death -- the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening.

— Sir Walter Scott

Is death the last step? No, it is the final awakening.

— Sir Walter Scott

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man.

— Chief Seattle

I have a rendezvous with Death at some disputed barricade.

— Alan Seeger

A punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor.

— Seneca

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

— Seneca

The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.

— Seneca

I care not, a man can die but once; we owe God and death.

— William Shakespeare

But I will be a bridegroom in my death, and run into a lover's bed.

— William Shakespeare

All that live must die, passing through nature to eternity.

— William Shakespeare

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. Treason has done his worst. Nor steel nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing can touch him further.

— William Shakespeare

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

— William Shakespeare

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven.

— William Shakespeare

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

— William Shakespeare

Men must endure, their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.

— William Shakespeare

The weariest and most loathed worldly life, that age, ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise, to what we fear of death.

— William Shakespeare

The undiscovered country form whose born no traveler returns. [Hamlet]

— William Shakespeare

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing --a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

— George Bernard Shaw

I want to be all used up when I die.

— George Bernard Shaw

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

— George Bernard Shaw

How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world's slow stain, he is secure.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times.

— Dean Smith

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

— Socrates

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

— Socrates

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

— Socrates

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

— Susan Sontag

For the dead there are no more toils.

— Sophocles

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

In my end is my beginning.

— Mary Stuart

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.

— Jonathan Swift

Authority forgets a dying king.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson

God's finger touched him and he slept.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson

Except for the young or very happy, I can't say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

— William M. Thackeray

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

— Paul Theroux

Do not go gentle into the good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day.

— Dylan Thomas

Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.

— Dylan Thomas

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

— Henry David Thoreau

But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

— James Thurber

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

— James Thurber

At the moment of death there will appear to you, swifter than lightning, the luminous splendor of the colorless light of emptiness, and that will surround you on all sides. Terrified, you will flee from the radiance. Try to submerge it is an obstacle blocking the path of liberation. yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self, all attachment to your illusory ego. Recognize that the boundless light of this true reality is your own true self, and you shall be saved!

— Tibetan

But the peasants -- how do the peasants die?

— Count Leo Tolstoy

I am ready to meet God face to face tonight and look into those eyes of infinite holiness, for all my sins are covered by the atoning blood.

— R. A. Torrey

Death is not a period, but a comma in the story of life.

— Amos Traver

Having seen and felt the end, you have willed the means to the realization of the end.

— Thomas Troward

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

— Mark Twain

Why is it that we rejoice at birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

— Mark Twain

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

— Mark Twain

We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.

— Mark Twain

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

— Mark Twain

All say, How hard it is that we have to die -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

— Mark Twain

We fear not death. That gloomy night, that pale-faced moon, and the affrighted stars that hurried through the sky, can witness that we fear not death.

— Source Unknown

When death overtakes us; all that we have is left to others; all that we are we take with us.

— Source Unknown

To fear death is to misunderstand life.

— Source Unknown

Those who have lived a good life do not fear death, but meet it calmly, and even long for it in the face of great suffering. But those who do not have a peaceful conscience, dread death as though life means nothing but physical torment. The challenge is to live our life so that we will be prepared for death when it comes.

— Source Unknown

Those to whom we say farewell, are welcomed by others.

— Source Unknown

It was once said that if you took all of the people who fell asleep in church and laid them end to end they would be more comfortable.

— Source Unknown