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.
—Nicharchus, c. 90Quotes
Is 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, 1728We and the dead ride quick at night.
—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773Death renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395The 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, 1950I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807Men 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, 1665It is noble to die before doing anything that deserves death.
—Anaxandrides, c. 376Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887Imagine 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.
—Blaise Pascal, 1669There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175I 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, 1900Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
—Iris Murdoch, 1974