Death keeps no calendar.
—George Herbert, 1640Quotes
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 BCThe play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843Men 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, 1665Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
—William Blake, c. 1790What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.
—Epictetus, c. 110The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 43 BCIt is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.
—Oliver Cromwell, 1658Nobody, sir, dies willingly.
—Antiphanes, c. 370 BCI don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
—Woody Allen, 1971Whoever has died is freed from sin.
—St. Paul, c. 50Can we not live without pleasure, who cannot but with pleasure die?
—Tertullian, c. 215It is noble to die before doing anything that deserves death.
—Anaxandrides, c. 376