Archive

Quotes

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

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819

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

—Iris Murdoch, 1974

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

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887

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.

—Blaise Pascal, 1669

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

—Tertullian, c. 215

I imagined it was more difficult to die. 

—Louis XIV, 1715

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

—William James, 1902

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

—Antiphanes, c. 370 BC

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.

—Pliny the Elder, c. 77

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.

—John Osborne, 1956

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

—Oliver Cromwell, 1658