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

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

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

Imagine 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.

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. 

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

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

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

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.

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

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

Men 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.