Whoever has died is freed from sin.
—St. Paul, c. 50Quotes
I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819The 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 BCEvery individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
—William James, 1902Men 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, 1665There 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. 175I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.
—Pierre Gassendi, 1655If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself.
—Saint Augustine, c. 420The 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, 1950Those 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. 400It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.
—Oliver Cromwell, 1658When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”
—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911