I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him.

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

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.

I’m doomed to die, right? Why should I care if I go to Hades either with gout in my leg or a runner’s grace? Plenty of people will carry me there.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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