I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

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.

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. 

I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.

To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

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.

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

Death renders all equal.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.