Quotations on Death

Only the young die good.

~ Oliver Herford

Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! ... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or "broken heart," is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. (Suicide Note, August 17, 1935)

~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

People living deeply have no fear of death.

~ Anaïs Nin

Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.

~ Epicurus

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.

~ Ernest Becker

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.

~ Gilda Radner

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.

~ John Muir

Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come.

~ Louisa May Alcott

- in Little Women, chapter 36

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

~ 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

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

~ Winston Churchill

To stop sinning suddenly.

~ Elbert Hubbard

I went into the woods for I wished to live, deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life! To put to rout all that was not life, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

~ Henry David Thoreau

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

~ Sir Walter Scott

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

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

~ Mark Twain

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

~ Eric Hoffer

Now comes the mystery.

~ Henry Ward Beecher

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

~ Henry van Dyke

God's finger touched him, and he slept.

~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
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~ William Shakespeare

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

~ William Shakespeare

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

~ Seneca

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.

~ Joyce Cary

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

~ Proverbs

He that lives to forever, never fears dying.

~ William Penn

Death comes to all
But great achievements build a monument
Which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

~ Georg Fabricius

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open, this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

~ Washington Irving

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

~ Lucan

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 James Ingalls