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.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888Quotes
I imagined it was more difficult to die.
—Louis XIV, 1715The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.
—Socrates, 399 BCThere 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.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714Death keeps no calendar.
—George Herbert, 1640Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.
—John Osborne, 1956A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCWhen a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”
—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself.
—Saint Augustine, c. 420You are dust, and to dust you shall return.
—Book of Genesis, c. 800 BCEvery individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
—William James, 1902