Whoever has died is freed from sin.
—St. Paul, c. 50Quotes
Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
—Horace Walpole, 1784A 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.
—Pliny the Elder, c. 77The 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, 1950What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.
—Epictetus, c. 110When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”
—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911I 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, 1900If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.
—Oliver Cromwell, 1658Is 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!
—Cotton Mather, 1728Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.
—John Osborne, 1956Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891