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

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

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

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.

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. 

Is this dying? Is this all? Is this all that I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this! I can bear it!

Let my epitaph be, “Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook.”

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.

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

Death keeps no calendar.

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.

What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.