Death Quotes

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DEATH QUOTES

quotations about death

Death Quotes There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

EUGENE IONESCO, Rhinoceros

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

J.M. BARRIE, Peter Pan

A man dies ... only a few circles in the water prove that he was ever there. And even they quickly disappear. And when they're gone, he's forgotten, without a trace, as if he'd never even existed. And that's all.

WOLFGANG BORCHERT, The Outsider

Dying is like getting audited by the IRS--something that only happens to other people ... until it happens to you.

JEROME P. CRABB, Death Quotes and Quibbles

The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others, no sir.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cowards die many times before their deaths
The valiant never taste of death but once.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar

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

SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Religio Medici

Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear,
To be we know not what, we know not where.

JOHN DRYDEN, Aureng-Zebe

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

VICTOR HUGO, Intellectual Autobiography

You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.

IAN FLEMING, You Only Live Twice

Morn after morn dispels the dark,
Bearing our lives away;
Absorbed in cares we fail to mark
How swift our years decay;
Some maddening draught hath drugged our souls,
In love with vital breath,
Which still the same sad chart unrolls,
Birth, eld, disease, and death.

BHARTRHARI, "Against the Desire of Worldly Things"

Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The House of the Seven Gables

Death Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.

YODA, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

The grave itself is but a covered bridge,
Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, The Golden Legend

Death will be a great relief. No more interviews.

KATHARINE HEPBURN, The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners

The world's an inn, and death the journey's end.

JOHN DRYDEN, Palamon and Arcite

As soon as one is born, one starts dying.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Henry IV

Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die--and soon,' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.

AUGUST WILSON, Fences

Dying is like coming to the end of a long novel--you only regret it if the ride was enjoyable and left you wanting more.

JEROME P. CRABB, Death Quotes and Quibbles

Those who think about death, carrying with them their existing ideas and emotions, usually assume that they will have, during their last hours, ideas and emotions of like vividness ... but they do not fully recognize the implication that the feeling faculty, too, is almost gone. The imagine the state to be one in which they can have emotions such as they now have on contemplating the cessation of life. But at the last all the mental powers simultaneously ebb, as do the bodily powers, and with them goes the capacity for emotion in general. It is, indeed, possible that in its last stages consciousness is occupied by a not displeasurable sense of rest.

HERBERT SPENCER, Facts and Comments

It seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with the cessation of consciousness at death, there ceases to be any knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though he had never lived. And then the consciousness itself -- what is it during the time that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements lapse into the Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were derived.

HERBERT SPENCER, Facts and Comments

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

HENRY FIELDING, Amelia

Death
As a dark Shadow
Beckons his prey
Into the unknown
By a soft whisper
In the soul

CINDY CHENEY, "Death"

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

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, American Note-Books, 1836

Death doesn't bargain.

AUGUST STRINDBERG, The Dance of Death

Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, Philosophical Essays

Self Portrait with Death as a Fiddler With death comes honesty.

SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Satanic Verses

Death is when the monsters get you.

STEPHEN KING, Salem's Lot

Death makes angels of us all
& gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven's
claws

JIM MORRISON, An American Prayer

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.

BERTOLT BRECHT, The Mother

Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.

JOHN ASHBERY, "A Last World"

Death's gang is bigger and tougher than anyone else's. Always has been and always will be. Death's the man.

MICHAEL MARSHALL, The Upright Man

Nothing is born which Death makes not subject of his state.

BHARTRHARI, "Of Time the Destroyer"

No one on his deathbed ever said, "I wish I had spent more time on my business."

PAUL E. TSONGAS, New York Times, Jan. 14, 1987

Who knows but life be that which men call death,
And death what men call life?

EURIPIDES, Phrixus [fragment]

A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most people live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.

DEAN KOONTZ, The Husband

A couch of thorns, or an embroidered bed,
Are matters of indifference to the dead.

THEOGNIS OF MEGARA, "Sumptuous Obsequies"

He that abideth when he might depart
From this world hath no wisdom in his heart.

FERDOWSI, Shahnameh

There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, "The Reaper and the Flowers"

Taunting Death ... means pitting oneself against a wily enemy who cannot lose.

J. K. ROWLING, The Tales of Beedle the Bard

When a house has just lost its soul, a stricken silence falls over the sudden emptiness that no one will fill again. And all the noises that may be made later in that house will be like a scandalous din, ugly echoes from one room to another, from one corridor to another, sharp and discordant as if the walls are no longer able to absorb any music once the source of harmony has been taken away. But this strange detail about the power of death can only be picked up by ears that are very attentive to the smallest murmurs of life. Rational people go through these empty spaces with the serenity of a lawyer, and their indulgent smiles categorise you if you decide to point out in their presence that there is something lacking in the atmosphere.

PIERRE, MAGNAN, The Messengers of Death

Death aims only once, but never misses.

EDWARD COUNSEL, Maxims

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

CORMAC MCCARTHY, Suttree

For death is but a passing phase of Life;
A change of dress, a disrobing;
A birth into the unborn again;
A commencing where we ended;
A starting where we stopped to rest;
A crossroad of Eternity;
A giving up of something, to possess all things.
The end of the unreal, the beginning of the real.

EDWIN LEIBFREED, "The Song of the Soul"

Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.

E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words

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

GEO Life, Death and Time RGE ELIOT, Adam Bede

How dreadful is the prospect of death, at the remotest distance! how the smallest apprehensions of it can pall the most gay, airy, and brisk spirits! even I, who thought I could have been merry in sight of my coffin, and drink a health with the sexton in my own grave, now tremble at the least envoy of the king of terrors. To see but the shaking of my glass makes me turn pale ... all the jollity of my humour and conversation is turned on a sudden into chagrin and melancholy, black as despair, and gloomy as the grave.

WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine

Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words

Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.

JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich

We are mere notes in a piece of music played by the angel Death--heard and lost.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought

Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.

RICHARD DAWKINS, The God Delusion

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

DON DELILLO, Underworld

What does thou ail, O mortal man, or to what purpose is to spend thy life in groans and complaints, under the apprehensions of Death? Where are thy past years and pleasures? Are they not vanish'd and lost in the flux of time, as if thou hadst put water into a sieve? Bethink thyself then of retreat, and leave the world with the same content and satisfaction as a well satisfied guest rises from an agreeable feast.

WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

STEVE JOBS, Commencement address at Stanford University, Jun. 12, 2005

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

HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit