Quotes about death

Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.

— Eric Hoffer

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

— Eric Hoffer

It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.

— Eric Hoffer

Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.

— Sydney Hook

Tis after death that we measure men.

— James Barron Hope

Pale death with an impartial foot knocks at the hovels of the poor and the palaces of king.

— Horace

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

— Horace

Death is the final wake-up call.

— Doug Horton

To awake from death is to die in peace.

— Doug Horton

Death is feared as birth is forgotten.

— Doug Horton

To stop sinning suddenly.

— Elbert Hubbard

My idea of walking into the jaws of death is marrying some woman who has lost three husbands.

— Kin Hubbard

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

— Aldous Huxley

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

— Aldous Huxley

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

— Aldous Huxley

In the democracy of the dead all men at last are equal. There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.

— John J. Ingalls

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

The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?

— Alice James

I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.

— Derek Jarman

We are but tenants and shortly the great landlord will give us notice that our lease has expired.

— Joseph Jefferson

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

— Samuel Johnson

I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.

— Samuel Johnson

The Father is the Giver of Life; but the Mother is the Giver of Death, because her womb is the gate of ingress to matter, and through her life is ensouled to form, and no form can be either infinite or eternal. Death is implicit in birth.

— Kabbalah

When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.

— John Keats

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

— John Keats

Teach me to live that I may dread, the grave as little as my bed.

— Thomas Ken

In the long run we are all dead.

— John Maynard Keynes

The essential part of our being can only survive if the transient part dissolves. Death is a condition of survival. That which has been gained must be eternalized, and can only be eternalized by being transmuted, by passing through death they must return

— Pir Vilayat Khan

Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances.

— Søren Kierkegaard

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

— Elisabeth KuBler-Ross

It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.

— Elisabeth KuBler-Ross

If some persons died, and others did not die, death would be a terrible affliction.

— Jean De La Bruyere

Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.

— Jean De La Fontaine

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We need not fear life, because God is the Ruler of all and we need not fear death, because He shares immortality with us.

— Ann Landers

I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

— Walter Savage Landor

The pomp of death is far more terrible than death itself.

— Nathaniel Lee

We are all dead men on leave.

— Eugene Levine

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?

— C. S. Lewis

It is hard to have patience with people who say There is no death or Death doesn't matter. There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

— C. S. Lewis

Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

— Abraham Lincoln

When a great man dies, for years the light he leaves behind him, lies on the paths of men.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The course of my long life hath reached at last in fragile bark over a tempestuous sea the common harbor, where must rendered be account for all the actions of the past.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I stay a little longer, as one stays, to cover up the embers that still burn.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.

— James Russell Lowell

But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet. Lessen like sound of friends departing feet; And death is beautiful as feet of friend. Coming with welcome at our journey's end.

— James Russell Lowell

The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life.

— F. L. Lucan

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

— Martin Luther

At death we cross from one territory to another, but we'll have no trouble with visas. Our representative is already there, preparing for our arrival. As citizens of heaven, our entrance is incontestable.

— Erwin W. Lutzer

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

— Douglas Macarthur

How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.

— George Macdonald

There is no such thing as death. In nature nothing dies. From each sad remnant of decay, some forms of life arise so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

— Charles Mackay

Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.

— Alexander Maclaren

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

— Paul De Man

We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning.

— Marcus Manilius

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.

— Thomas Mann

A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.

— Andrew Marvell

Either he's dead or my watch has stopped.

— Groucho Marx

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

— W. Somerset Maugham

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

— W. Somerset Maugham

There is no death. the stars go down to rise upon some other shore. And bright in Heaven's jeweled crown, they shine for ever more.

— John Luckey Mccreery

It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.

— George Mcgovern

Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.

— Herman Melville

At birth man is offered only one choice --the choice of his death. But if this choice is governed by distaste for his own existence, his life will never have been more than meaningless.

— Jean-Pierre Melville

A human act once set in motion flows on forever to the great account. Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are.

— George Meredith

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.

— Thomas Merton

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

— Henry Miller

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

— Henry Miller

Death is delightful. Death is dawn, the waking from a weary night of fevers unto truth and light.

— Joaquin Miller

Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity.

— John Milton

How gladly would I meet mortality, my sentence, and be earth in sensible! how glad would lay me down, as in my mother's lap! There I should rest, and sleep secure.

— John Milton

Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.

— William Mitford

I want death to find me planting my cabbage

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. My advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

It is not death that alarms me, but dying.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

We should weep for men at their birth, not at their death.

— Charles De Montesquieu

Yet nightly pitch my moving tent, a day's march nearer home.

— James Montgomery

Death may be the King of terrors... but Jesus is the King of kings!

— Dwight L. Moody

I hate funerals and would not attend my own if it could be avoided, but it is well for every man to stop once in a while to think of what sort of a collection of mourners he is training for his final event.

— Robert T. Morris

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.

— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

So that he seemed not to relinquish life, but to leave one home for another.

— Cornelius Nepos

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

We all of us waited for him to die. The family sent him a check every month, and hoped he'd get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss.

— John Osborne

An evil life is a kind of death.

— Ovid

If only I could understand the reason for my crying. If only I could stop this fear of dreaming that I'm dying.

— Laura Palmer

Die, my dear doctor! That's the last thing I shall do!

— Lord Palmerston

He that lives to forever, never fears dying.

— William Penn

He has gone over to the majority.

— Petronius

O how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living.

— Philip II

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

— Francis Picabia

dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.

— Sylvia Plath

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

— Plato

He whom the Gods love dies young, while he is in health, has his senses and his judgments sound.

— Titus Maccius Plautus