I imagined it was more difficult to die.
—Louis XIV, 1715Quotes
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
—William Blake, c. 1790To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819Death renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395I’m doomed to die, right? Why should I care if I go to Hades either with gout in my leg or a runner’s grace? Plenty of people will carry me there.
—Nicharchus, c. 90Death keeps no calendar.
—George Herbert, 1640Imagine 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, 1669We and the dead ride quick at night.
—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
—Horace Walpole, 1784The 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. 1888Men 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, 1665A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCWhoever has died is freed from sin.
—St. Paul, c. 50