Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Quotes
I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
—William Blake, c. 1790I 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, 1900The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.
—Socrates, 399 BCThose 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.
—Bhartrihari, c. 400I imagined it was more difficult to die.
—Louis XIV, 1715I’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. 90The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843Death renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 43 BCThere is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and, secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.
—Robert G. Ingersoll, 1879