Archive

Quotes

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

—Lord Byron, 1817

It is noble to die before doing anything that deserves death.

—Anaxandrides, c. 376

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

—St. Paul, c. 50

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

—Iris Murdoch, 1974

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

—Thomas Hobbes, 1679

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.

—Pliny the Elder, c. 77

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

—Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, 1790

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

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

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

—John Osborne, 1956

I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

—Woody Allen, 1971

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

—William James, 1902

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773

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

—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911