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

I 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.

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. 

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

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.

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

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.

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.

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

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

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

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