What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.

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

Is this dying? Is this all? Is this all that I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this! I can bear it!

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

Death keeps no calendar.

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

I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

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.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

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.

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.