Let my epitaph be, “Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook.”
—Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, 1790Quotes
I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
—Thomas Hobbes, 1679I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807It is noble to die before doing anything that deserves death.
—Anaxandrides, c. 376I’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. 90It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.
—Oliver Cromwell, 1658If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706Nobody, sir, dies willingly.
—Antiphanes, c. 370 BCDeath renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
—Horace Walpole, 1784The 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, 1879Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887The 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. 1888