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

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

Can we not live without pleasure, who cannot but with pleasure die?

Death renders all equal.

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

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.

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

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

If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself. 

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

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.