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. 

Is 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!

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.

Death keeps no calendar.

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.

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”

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.

Death renders all equal.

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

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

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

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