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

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

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

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

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

Death renders all equal.

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

The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and, secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.

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

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

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

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.