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

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

Death renders all equal.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

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.

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.

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.

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.