Archive

Quotes

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807

Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.

—John Osborne, 1956

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

—Book of Genesis, c. 800 BC

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.

—Hermann Hesse, 1950

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

—Iris Murdoch, 1974

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.

—Nicharchus, c. 90

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

—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911

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.

—Bhartrihari, c. 400

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

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

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.

—Robert G. Ingersoll, 1879

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

—Pierre Gassendi, 1655

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

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

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.

—Socrates, 399 BC