404 quotes about Death and Dying

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

Addison, Joseph

See in what peace a Christian can die.

Addison, Joseph

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

Allen, Woody

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

Allen, Woody

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

Allen, Woody

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

Almes, Guy

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.

Alsop, Steward

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.

Arendt, Hannah

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.

Arndt, Ernest Moritz

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

Arnold, Matthew

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Arnold, Matthew

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Auerbach, Red

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.

Aurelius, Marcus

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

Aurelius, Marcus

It is natural to die as to be born.

Bacon, Francis

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Bacon, Francis

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

Bacon, Francis

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

Bagnold, Enid

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.

Baldwin, James

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!

Barbauld, Anna Letitia

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.

Bardot, Brigitte

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

Barker, Clive

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

Barrie, Sir James M.

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

Barrie, Sir James M.

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

Barrymore, John

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

Bayly, Joseph

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

Bayly, Joseph

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

Beaumont, Francis

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

Becht, Ben

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.

Beckett, Samuel

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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;

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Belloc, Hilaire

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.

Berger, John

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

Berra, Yogi

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

Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. [Psalms 39:4]

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.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Bright, Grant M.

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

Bright, Grant M.

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.

Broch, Hermann

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

Bronte, Emily

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.

Browne, Sir Thomas

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

Browne, Sir Thomas

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

Browne, Sir Thomas

Death is the cure for all diseases.

Browne, Sir Thomas

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Bryant, William C.

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

Buffet, Jimmy

The fear of death is worse than death.

Burton, Robert

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

Butler, Samuel

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

Butler, Samuel

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

Butler, Samuel

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

Butler, Samuel

For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast. And the heart must pause to breathe, and love itself have rest.

Byron, Lord

I have seen a thousand graves opened, and always perceived that whatever was gone, the teeth and hair remained of those who had died with them. Is not this odd? They go the very first things in youth and yet last the longest in the dust.

Byron, Lord

Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, and yet a third of life is passed in sleep.

Byron, Lord

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

Camus, Albert

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

Camus, Albert

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Camus, Albert

He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.

Canetti, Elias

For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

Carson, Johnny

I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.

Cary, Joyce

Along with the lazy man... the dying man is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others.

Certeau, Michel De

Well, there's a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.

Cervantes, Miguel De

'Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o'er the pate, or a kick of the guts; to go out like the snuff of a farthing candle, and die merely of the mulligrubs, or the sullens.

Cervantes, Miguel De

Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a clown; all's fish that comes to his net; he throws at all, and sweeps stakes; he's no mower that takes a nap at noon-day, but drives on, fair weather or foul, and cuts down the green grass as well as the ripe corn: he's neither squeamish nor queesy-stomach d, for he swallows without chewing, and crams down all things into his ungracious maw; and you can see no belly he has, he has a confounded dropsy, and thirsts after men's lives, which he gurgles down like mother's milk.

Cervantes, Miguel De

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.

Chandler, Raymond

Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.

Chandler, Raymond

He had been, he said, an unconscionable time dying; but he hoped that they would excuse it.

Charles II

You cannot live without lawyers, and certainly you cannot die without them.

Choate, Joseph H.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

Chopra, Deepak

I am ready to meet my maker, but whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Churchill, Winston

That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place.

Cicero, Marcus T.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Cicero, Marcus T.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

Cocteau, Jean

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Cocteau, Jean

An orphan's curse would drag to hell, a spirit from on high; but oh! more horrible than that, is a curse in a dead man's eye!

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.

Colton, Charles Caleb

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat.

Conrad, Joseph

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

Da Vinci, Leonardo

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Da Vinci, Leonardo

These have not the hope to die.

Dante (Alighieri)

I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.

Darrow, Clarence

I am not the least afraid to die.

Darwin, Charles

To be born free is an accident; To live free a responsibility; To die free is an obligation.

Davis, Mrs Hubbard

Few cross the river of time and are able to reach non-being. Most of them run up and down only on this side of the river. But those who when they know the law follow the path of the law, they shall reach the other shore and go beyond the realm of death.

Dhammapada

Death doesn't frighten me.

Diana, Princess of Wales

He would make a lovely corpse.

Dickens, Charles

Death is a Dialogue between, the Spirit and the Dust.

Dickinson, Emily

Dying is a wild night and a new road.

Dickinson, Emily

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

Dickinson, Emily

Let us go in; the fog is rising.

Dickinson, Emily

The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.

Diderot, Denis

When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin.

Donleavy, J. P.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

Donne, John

I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.

Donne, John

As virtuous men pass mildly away, and whisper to their souls to go, whilst some of their sad friends do say, the breath goes now, and some say no.

Donne, John

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

Donne, John

Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.

Dowell, Coleman

All human things are subject to decay, and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.

Dryden, John

He was exhaled; his great Creator drew His spirit, as the sun the morning dew.

Dryden, John

Like pilgrims to the appointed place we tend; The world's an inn, and death the journey's end.

Dryden, John

To die is landing on some distant shore.

Dryden, John

A dead atheist is someone who is all dressed up with no place to go.

Duffecy, James

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

Durrell, Lawrence

The last suit that you wear, you don't need any pockets.

Dyer, Wayne

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

Einstein, Albert

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Eliot, George

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

Eliot, George

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet

Eliot, George

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Eliot, T. S.

Death is the last enemy: once we've got past that I think everything will be alright.

Ellis, Alice Thomas

Let death be daily before your eyes, and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.

Epictetus

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men all live in a city without walls.

Epicurus

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

Epicurus

Remember man as you walk by, as you are now so once was I, as I am now, so you will be, so prepare for death and follow me.

Epitaph

But learn that to die is a debt we must all pay.

Euripides

We all have to die some day, if we live long enough.

Farber, Dave

It hath often been said that it is not death but dying that is terrible.

Fielding, Henry

It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.

Fielding, Henry

Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.

Forster, Edward M.

The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water. It flows down, clean and cool, from the heights of Herman and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon. the Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it, the Sea of Galilee has an outlet. It gets to give. It gathers in its riches that it may pour them out again to fertilize the Jordan plain. But the Dead Sea with the same water makes horror. For the Dead Sea has no outlet. It gets to keep.

Fosdick, Harry Emerson

The pride of dying rich raises the loudest laugh in hell.

Foster, John W.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

Franklin, Benjamin

Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five.

Franklin, Benjamin

Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

Frohman, Charles

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

Fromm, Erich

Plan for this world as if you expect to live forever; but plan for the hereafter as if you expect to die tomorrow.

Gabirol, Ibn

Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.

Gide, Andre

Death is the only inescapable, unavoidable, sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we're born.

Gilmore, Gary Mark

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

A useless life is an early death.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Gray, Thomas

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

Greene, Graham

Man has the possibility of existence after death. But possibility is one thing and the realization of the possibility is quite a different thing.

Gurdjieff, George

A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror.

Gurdjieff, George

The death of what's dead is the birth of what's living.

Guthrie, Arlo

Oh you who have been removed from God in his solitude by the abyss of time, how can you expect to reach him without dying?

Hallaj

I never think he is quite ready for another world who is altogether weary of this.

Hamilton, Hugh

In the last analysis it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions life puts to us.

Hammarskjold, Dag

If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party.

Hammarskjold, Dag

Your body must become familiar with its death -- in all its possible forms and degrees -- as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.

Hammarskjold, Dag

To leave is to die a little... one leaves behind a little of oneself at any hour, at any place.

Haracourt, Edmond

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Hauer, Rutger

You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.

Havner, Vance

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred --it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death is the greatest assayer of the sterling ore of talent. At his touch the dropsy particles fall off, the irritable, the personal, the gross, and mingle with the dust --the finer and more ethereal part mounts with winged spirit to watch over our latest memory, and protect our bones from insult. We consign the least worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish the nobler and imperishable nature with double pride and fondness.

Hazlitt, William

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

Hazlitt, William

Don't strew me with roses after I'm dead. When Death claims the light of my brow No flowers of life will cheer me: instead You may give me my roses now!

Healey, Thomas F.

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Heidegger, Martin

When I die, I want people to play my music, go wild and freak out and do anything they want to do.

Hendrix, Jimi

Madam, Life's a piece in bloom death goes dogging everywhere: She's the tenant of the room he's the ruffian on the stair.

Henley, William Ernest

Only the young die good.

Herford, Oliver

Death is like an arrow that is already in flight, and your life lasts only until it reaches you.

Hermes, Georg

Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.

Herodotus

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Hesse, Hermann

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

Hoffer, Eric

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

Hoffer, Eric

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

Hoffer, Eric

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.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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!

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Hook, Sydney

'Tis after death that we measure men.

Hope, James Barron

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.

Horton, Doug

To awake from death is to die in peace.

Horton, Doug

Death is feared as birth is forgotten.

Horton, Doug

To stop sinning suddenly.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Hubbard, Kin

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.

Huxley, Aldous

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?

Huxley, Aldous

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.

Huxley, Aldous

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.

Ingalls, John J.

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.

Ionesco, Eugene

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

James, Alice

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.

Jarman, Derek

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

Jefferson, Joseph

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.

Johnson, Samuel

I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.

Johnson, Samuel

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.

Keats, John

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

Keats, John

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

Ken, Thomas

In the long run we are all dead.

Keynes, John Maynard

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

Khan, Pir Vilayat

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.

Kierkegaard, Soren

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.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

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.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

La Fontaine, Jean De

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

Landers, Ann

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

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Lee, Nathaniel

We are all dead men on leave.

Levine, Eugene

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?

Lewis, C. S.

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.

Lewis, C. S.

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.

Lincoln, Abraham

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Lowell, James Russell

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.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Lucan, F. L.

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

Luther, Martin

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.

Lutzer, Erwin W.

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

Macarthur, Douglas

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

Macdonald, George

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.

Mackay, Charles

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

Maclaren, Alexander

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Man, Paul De

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

Manilius, Marcus

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

Mann, Thomas

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

Marvell, Andrew

Either he's dead or my watch has stopped.

Marx, Groucho

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

Mccreery, John Luckey

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.

Mcgovern, George

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.

Melville, Herman

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.

Melville, Jean-Pierre

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.

Meredith, George

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.

Merton, Thomas

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

Miller, Henry

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.

Miller, Henry

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

Miller, Joaquin

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

Milton, John

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.

Milton, John

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

Mitford, William

I want death to find me planting my cabbage

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

It is not death that alarms me, but dying.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Montgomery, James

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

Moody, Dwight L.

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.

Morris, Robert T.

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.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

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

Nepos, Cornelius

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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.

Osborne, John

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.

Palmer, Laura

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

Palmerston, Lord

He that lives to forever, never fears dying.

Penn, William

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.

Picabia, Francis

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.

Plath, Sylvia

Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Plato

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.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

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.

Poe, Edgar Allan

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.

Pope, Alexander

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.

Pound, Ezra

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.

Proust, Marcel

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

If your time ain't come not even a doctor can kill you.

Proverb, American

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

Proverb, Arabian

Life is a dream walking death is a going home.

Proverb, Chinese

Death is a shadow that always follows the body.

Proverb, English

Death always comes too early or too late.

Proverb, English

Our last garment is made without pockets.

Proverb, Italian

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

Proverb, Italian

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

Proverb, Persian

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

Proverb, Portuguese

A wooden bed is better than a golden coffin.

Proverb, Russian

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

Proverb, Yiddish

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

Rabelais, Francois

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!

Raleigh, Sir Walter

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

Renan, Ernest

So little done, so much to do.

Rhodes, Cecil

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

Richter, Jean Paul

Death gives us sleep, eternal youth, and immortality.

Richter, Jean Paul

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

Rooney, Andy

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

Rossetti, Christina

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

Rossetti, Christina

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

Roth, Philip

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.]

Rowland, Gena

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?

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

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

Ruskin, John

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

Russell, Bertrand

Most people would rather die than think: many do.

Russell, Bertrand

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

Sachs, A.

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.

Sade, Marquis De

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.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

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

Sand, George

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.

Santayana, George

What shall he fear that does not fear death.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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 dearth.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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.

Seattle, Chief

I have a rendezvous with Death at some disputed barricade.

Seeger, Alan

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.

Shakespeare, William

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Shakespeare, William

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.

Shakespeare, William

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.

Shakespeare, William

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

Shakespeare, William

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

Shakespeare, William

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

Shakespeare, William

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.

Shakespeare, William

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

Shakespeare, William

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.

Shaw, George Bernard

I want to be all used up when I die.

Shaw, George Bernard

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

Shaw, George Bernard

How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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

Smith, Dean

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

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Sontag, Susan

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

Sontag, Susan

For the dead there are no more toils.

Sophocles

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

Spark, Muriel

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.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

In my end is my beginning.

Stuart, Mary

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.

Swift, Jonathan

Authority forgets a dying king.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

God's finger touched him and he slept.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

Thackeray, William M.

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.

Theroux, Paul

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

Thomas, Dylan

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

Thomas, Dylan

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Thurber, James

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

Thurber, James

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?

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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.

Torrey, R. A.

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

Traver, Amos

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

Troward, Thomas

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.

Twain, Mark

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

Twain, Mark

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.

Twain, Mark

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

Twain, Mark

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.

Twain, Mark

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Twain, Mark

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.

Twain, Mark

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.

Unknown, Source

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

Unknown, Source

To fear death is to misunderstand life.

Unknown, Source

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.

Unknown, Source

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

Unknown, Source

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.

Unknown, Source

God's retirement plan is out of this world

Unknown, Source

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.

Unknown, Source

A good man dies when a boy goes wrong.

Unknown, Source

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.

Upanishad, Katha

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

Ussher, Percival Arland

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

Van Dyke, Henry

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

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]

Wallace, William

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

Warhol, Andy

God buries His workmen but carries on His work.

Wesley, Charles

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

Whitefield, George

To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Whitman, Walt

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

Whitman, Walt

Once can survive everything nowadays, except death.

Wilde, Oscar

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Wilde, Oscar

I am dying beyond my means.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Williams, Robin

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.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Wolfe, Thomas

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

Woolf, Virginia

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.

Wordsworth, William

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.

Yeats, William Butler

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

Virtue alone has majesty in death.

Young, Edward

All men think that all men are mortal but themselves.

Young, Edward

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

Zeno, Citium