I imagined it was more difficult to die.
—Louis XIV, 1715Quotes
Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
—William James, 1902Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
—Iris Murdoch, 1974The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.
—Lord Byron, 1817Those 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.
—Bhartrihari, c. 400A god cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good.
—Pliny the Elder, c. 77Nobody, sir, dies willingly.
—Antiphanes, c. 370 BCThe 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.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888Is this dying? Is this all? Is this all that I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this! I can bear it!
—Cotton Mather, 1728Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
—William Blake, c. 1790Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714