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.

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.

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.

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

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 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.

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

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.

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.

The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

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.