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.

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

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

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.

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

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Death keeps no calendar.

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

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

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

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

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.