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

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

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.

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

It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

Death renders all equal.

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.

The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.

There 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.

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.

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.