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

I think it makes small difference to the dead if they are buried in the tokens of luxury. All this is an empty glorification left for those who live.

Death renders all equal.

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

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.

The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive. 

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

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

There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.

I imagined it was more difficult to die. 

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

Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.

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.