I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

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

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

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

If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself. 

Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.

The 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. 

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

Can we not live without pleasure, who cannot but with pleasure die?

Men 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. 

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.