It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.
—Oliver Cromwell, 1658Quotes
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.
—Lord Byron, 1817I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
—Woody Allen, 1971Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
—William James, 1902A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCI’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.
—Nicharchus, c. 90The 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.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
—Thomas Hobbes, 1679I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1928The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and, secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.
—Robert G. Ingersoll, 1879We and the dead ride quick at night.
—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773