Quotes about death

God's retirement plan is out of this world

— Source Unknown

When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Grandfather did -- in his sleep. Not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car.

— Jack Handey

A good man dies when a boy goes wrong.

— Source Unknown

What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death.

— Katha Upanishad

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

— Percival Arland Ussher

Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.

— Henry Van Dyke

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the

— Raoul Vaneigem

Dear me! I must be turning into a god.

— Vespasian

I have lived, and I have run the course which fortune allotted me; and now my shade shall descend illustrious to the grave.

— Virgil

Death twitches my ear. Live, he says, I am coming.

— Virgil

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

— Voltaire

Every man dies. Not every man really lives. [In the movie Braveheart]

— William Wallace

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

— Andy Warhol

God buries His workmen but carries on His work.

— Charles Wesley

Take care of your of your life and the Lord will take of your death.

— George Whitefield

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

— Walt Whitman

One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.

— Oscar Wilde

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

— Oscar Wilde

For he who lives more lives than one: More deaths than one must die.

— Oscar Wilde

I am dying beyond my means.

— Oscar Wilde

Death is nature's way of saying, Your table's ready.

— Robin Williams

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.

— Thomas Wolfe

No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees; rolled around in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.

— William Wordsworth

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

— William Butler Yeats

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them.

— Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Virtue alone has majesty in death.

— Edward Young

All men think that all men are mortal but themselves.

— Edward Young

No evil is honorable: but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.

— Citium Zeno

Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He comet up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

— Book Of Common Prayer

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

— Robert Frost

Tis all a Checker-board of Nights and days where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates and slays, and one by one back in the Closet lays.

— Omar Khayyam

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

— D. H. Lawrence

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 does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death.

— Pier Paolo Pasolini

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.

— William Shakespeare

A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass.

— Hester i Thrale

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

— Edward Young

The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.

— Joseph Addison

See in what peace a Christian can die.

— Joseph Addison

I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

— Woody Allen

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily as lying down.

— Woody Allen

I don't believe in an after life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

— Woody Allen

There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network.

— Guy Almes

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.

— Steward Alsop

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

— Hannah Arendt

Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod.

— Aristophanes

Nothing that is really good and God-like dies.

— Ernest Moritz Arndt

Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.

— Matthew Arnold

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

— Matthew Arnold

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

— W. H. Auden

To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.

— Red Auerbach

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

— Marcus Aurelius

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

— Marcus Aurelius

It is natural to die as to be born.

— Francis Bacon

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

— Francis Bacon

As for death one gets used to it, even if it's only other people's death you get used to.

— Enid Bagnold

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

— James Baldwin

When one by one our ties are torn, and friend from friend is snatched forlorn; When man is left alone to mourn, oh! then how sweet it is to die!

— Anna Letitia Barbauld

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life. Death was like love, a romantic escape. I took pills because I didn't want to throw myself off my balcony and know people would photograph me lying dead below.

— Brigitte Bardot

To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!

— Clive Barker

The best place a person can die, is where they die for others.

— Sir James M. Barrie

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

— Sir James M. Barrie

Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.

— John Barrymore

Death is the great adventure beside which moon landings and space trips pale into insignificance.

— Joseph Bayly

Death always waits. The door of the hearse is never closed.

— Joseph Bayly

Let no man fear to die, we love to sleep all, and death is but the sounder sleep.

— Francis Beaumont

There's a thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die; their silence.

— Ben Becht

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.

— Samuel Beckett

Death is the dropping of the flower that the fruit may swell.

— Henry Ward Beecher

Living is death; dying is life. We are not what we appear to be. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that citizens; on this side orphans, on that children;

— Henry Ward Beecher

Loss and possession, Death and life are one. There falls no shadow where There shines no sun.

— Hilaire Belloc

A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.

— John Berger

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.

— Yogi Berra

Death is as sure for that which is born, as birth is for that which is dead. Therefore grieve not for what is inevitable.

— Bhagavad Gita

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. [Matthew 10:28]

— Bible

As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. [Job 14:11-12]

— Bible

For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. [1 Timothy 6:7]

— Bible

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death. [New Testament]

— Bible

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. [Psalm 23:4]

— Bible

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? [1 Corinthians 15:55]

— Bible

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His godly ones. [Psalms 116:15]

— Bible

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. [1 Corinthians 15:26]

— Bible

You must not fear death, my lads; defy him, and you drive him into the enemy's ranks.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Most of us die with much of our beautiful music still in us, un-sung, un-played.

— Grant M. Bright

How long after you are gone will ripples remain as evidence that you were cast into the pool of life?

— Grant M. Bright

No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.

— Hermann Broch

Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.

— Emily Bronte

Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.

— Sir Thomas Browne

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.

— Sir Thomas Browne

We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

— Sir Thomas Browne

Death is the cure for all diseases.

— Sir Thomas Browne

For 'Tis not in mere death that men die most.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

All that tread, the globe are but a handful to the tribes, that slumber in its bosom.

— William C. Bryant

I'd rather die while I'm living then live while I'm dead.

— Jimmy Buffett

The fear of death is worse than death.

— Robert Burton

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

— Samuel Butler

If life must not be taken too seriously -- then so neither must death.

— Samuel Butler