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 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.

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

Let my epitaph be, “Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook.”

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.

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

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

In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of wisdom and should not be done.

Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.