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Quotes

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

—William Blake, c. 1790

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 43 BC

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

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887

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

—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911

I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.

—Lord Byron, 1817

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

—John Osborne, 1956

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.

—Euripides, 415 BC

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

—Book of Genesis, c. 800 BC

It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.

—Oliver Cromwell, 1658

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

—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

The 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, 1879

In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of wisdom and should not be done.

—Confucius, c. 500 BC

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.

—Bhartrihari, c. 400