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.
—Saint Augustine, c. 420Quotes
Nobody, sir, dies willingly.
—Antiphanes, c. 370 BCIf a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706Whoever has died is freed from sin.
—St. Paul, c. 50To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819Men 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.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665The 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.
—Hermann Hesse, 1950Can we not live without pleasure, who cannot but with pleasure die?
—Tertullian, c. 215We and the dead ride quick at night.
—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
—Woody Allen, 1971I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807I 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.
—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906