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

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

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

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

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.

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

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. 

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

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

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.

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

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.