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.

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

Death renders all equal.

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

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

Man has here two and a half minutes—one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.

Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.

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.

Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

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