You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of wisdom and should not be done.

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

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.

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.

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

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. 

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

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

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 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.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.