If 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. 

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. 

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

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.

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

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.

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.

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

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

To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.

I imagined it was more difficult to die. 

Death keeps no calendar.