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.
—Euripides, 415 BCQuotes
Nobody, sir, dies willingly.
—Antiphanes, c. 370 BCBereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
—Iris Murdoch, 1974Death renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395Let my epitaph be, “Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook.”
—Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, 1790We and the dead ride quick at night.
—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773Man has here two and a half minutes—one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.
—Jean Paul, 1795Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.
—John Osborne, 1956I 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.
—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900Those 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.
—Bhartrihari, c. 400I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1928Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
—Thomas Hobbes, 1679