The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”

I imagined it was more difficult to die. 

Imagine 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.

The 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.

Death keeps no calendar.

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

What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.

The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.

A 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.

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