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Quotes

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

—Horace Walpole, 1784

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

—Woody Allen, 1971

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

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

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.

—Blaise Pascal, 1669

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. 

—Samuel Butler, c. 1888

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

—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911

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

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

—Pierre Gassendi, 1655

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.

—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1928

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

—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

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. 

—La Rochefoucauld, 1665