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.

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

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

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!

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

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

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

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

A god cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good.

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. 

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.

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.