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

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

It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

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

I think it makes small difference to the dead if they are buried in the tokens of luxury. All this is an empty glorification left for those who live.

I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.

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

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.

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

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. 

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