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

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

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

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.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.

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.

I imagined it was more difficult to die. 

I’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.

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

Death renders all equal.

The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

There 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.

The 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.