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.

I’m doomed to die, right? Why should I care if I go to Hades either with gout in my leg or a runner’s grace? Plenty of people will carry me there.

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

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.

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

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

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

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. 

If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself. 

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

Death renders all equal.

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.