Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

I think it makes small difference to the dead if they are buried in the tokens of luxury. All this is an empty glorification left for those who live.

I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him.

Death keeps no calendar.

The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive. 

If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself. 

Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.

It is noble to die before doing anything that deserves death.

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and, looking at each other with grief and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.

Man has here two and a half minutes—one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.

There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.