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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him.

A 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.

Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

Men 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. 

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

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

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