Here are a few quotations by famous people (in alphabetical order) about death.
| Unknown |
Death is life's way of telling you you're fired. |
| Unknown |
God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled. |
| Unknown |
There is always death and taxes; however, death doesn't get worse every year. |
| Aeschylus |
Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny. |
| Aeschylus |
There's nothing certain in a man's life except this: That he must lose it. |
| Allen, Woody |
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying. |
| Allen, Woody |
It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune. |
| Allen, Woody |
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down. |
| Allen, Woody |
There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman? |
| Alsop, Stewart |
A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist. |
| Arnold, Edwin |
For death,
Now I know, is that first breath
Which our souls draw when we enter
Life, which is of all life center. |
| Artaud, Antonin |
We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary. |
| Asimov, Isaac |
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. |
| Aurelius, Marcus |
Death is a release from the impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and the hard service of the flesh. |
| Bacon, Essays, Francis |
Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. |
| Bernard Shaw, George |
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in. |
| Bernard Shaw, George |
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. |
| Bierce, Ambrose |
Embalm, v.: To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and the rose are languishing for a nibble at his gluteus maximus. |
| Brecht, Bertolt |
Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life. |
| Bronte, Emily |
Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity. |
| Browne, Thomas |
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death. |
| Büchner, Ludwig |
Death is the surest calculation that can be made. |
| Burns, George |
If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age. |
| Butler, Samuel |
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead. |
| Bynner, Witter |
Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death. |
| Byron, George Gordon |
'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it. |
| Byron, George Gordon |
Death, the sable smoke where vanishes the flame. |
| Carlin, George |
Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time. |
| Carson, Johnny |
For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off. |
| Cary, Alice |
My soul is full of whispered song;
My blindness is my sight;
The shadows that I feared so long
Are all alive with light. |
| Cather, Willa |
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived. |
| Collins, Mortimer |
Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure. |
| Conan Doyle, Arthur |
There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world. |
| Cousins, Norman |
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. |
| Cushing, Harvey |
There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death. |
| Da Vinci, Leonardo |
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. |
| Da Vinci, Leonardo |
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death. |
| Day, Doris |
The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it. |
| De Gaulle, Charles |
The graveyards are full of indispensable men. |
| De La Fontaine, Jean |
Death never takes the wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go. |
| De Saint-Exupery, Antoine |
He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man. |
| Dickinson, Emily |
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality. |
| Donne, John |
God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath. |
| Dow, Philip |
Death is patiently making my mask as I sleep. Each morning I awake to discover in the corners of my eyes the small tears of his wax. |
| Dylan, Bob |
He not busy being born is busy dying. |
| Einstein, Albert |
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. |
| Einstein, Albert |
Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life. |
| Eliot, George |
Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again. |
| Elliott, Hugh |
I am not dying, not anymore than any of us are at any moment. We run, hopefully as fast as we can, and then everyone must stop. We can only choose how we handle the race. |
| Epicurus |
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not. |
| Erikson, Erik |
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death. |
| Ertz, Susan |
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. |
| Euripides |
Death is a debt we all must pay. |
| Euripides |
No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow. |
| Falcone, Giovanni |
He who doesn't fear death dies only once. |
| Francois Regnier, René |
Gaily I lived as ease and nature taught,
And spent my little life without a thought,
And am amazed that Death, that tyrant grim,
Should think of me, who never thought of him. |
| Freud, Sigmund |
The goal of all life is death. |
| Frewer, Matt |
Never knock on Death's door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that! |
| Furnas, J. |
Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees. |
| Geis, Richard |
I wouldn't mind dying - it's the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me. |
| Gibran, Kahlil |
For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind? |
| Giraudoux, Jean |
I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life. |
| Gita, Bhagavad |
For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead;
Therefore over the inevitable
Thou shouldst not grieve. |
| Goldman, William |
Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. |
| Goldwyn, Samuel |
If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive. |
| Hanson Towne, Charles |
Thou art not dead! Thou art the whole
Of life that quickens in the sod. |
| Harris, Robert |
You can be a king or a street sweeper,
But everybody dances with the Grim Reaper. |
| Herodotus |
Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men. |
| Homer |
And they die an equal death - the idler and the man of mighty deeds. |
| Homer |
Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor. |
| Horace |
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings. |
| Horace |
Years, following years, steal something every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away. |
| Jung, Carl |
To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. |
| Kahlo, Frida |
I hope the leaving is joyful; and I hope never to return. |
| Leary, Denis |
Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then one day you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then one day you step off a curb at Sixty-Seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe. |
| Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan |
Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed. |
| Madame De Staël |
We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. |
| Maeterlinck, Maurice |
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing. |
| Maher, Bill |
Suicide is man's way of telling God, "You can't fire me - I quit". |
| Mann, Thomas |
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own. |
| Marcus Aurelius |
Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills. |
| McGruder, Aaron |
When I pass, speak freely of my shortcomings and my flaws. Learn from them, for I'll have no ego to injure. |
| McMaster, Lois |
The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them. |
| Mencken, Henry Louis |
When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. |
| Milholland, Randy |
I guess that's how death works. It doesn't matter if we're ready or not. It just happens. |
| Mizner, Wilson |
I want a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant clergyman. I want to hedge my bets. |
| Mizner, Wilson |
Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up. |
| Montagu, Ashley |
The idea is to die young as late as possible. |
| Muir, John |
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life. |
| Munch, Edvard |
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. |
| Nietzsche, Friedrich |
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there. |
| Nin, Anaïs |
People living deeply have no fear of death. |
| Patchen, Kenneth |
There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death. |
| Peirce, Charles |
If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death. |
| Penn, William |
For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. |
| Plato |
Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death? |
| Plato |
No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well. |
| Proust, Marcel |
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad. |
| Proust, Marcel |
We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. |
| Ribon, Pamela |
It's sad when our daddies die. Makes us one less person inside. |
| Rigaut, Jacques |
God is growing bitter, he envies man his mortality. |
| Rooney, Andrew |
Death is a distant rumor to the young. |
| "Roseanne" |
If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn't going to be much fun. |
| Rowling, Joanne |
After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. |
| Ryokan |
Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream. |
| Sachs, Andrew |
Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives. |
| Salinger, Jerome David |
Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddamn cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody. |
| Santayana, George |
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. |
| Sarnoff, David |
We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death. |
| Schopenhauer, Arthur |
They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person. |
| Seneca |
The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity. |
| Sheed, Wilfred |
Suicide is... the sincerest form of criticism life gets. |
| Socrates |
Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. |
| Somerset Maugham, Willi... |
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. |
| Sophocles |
Death is not the worst; rather, in vain
To wish for death, and not to compass it. |
| Stalin, Joseph |
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. |
| Stiles, Steven |
God made death so we'd know when to stop. |
| Swift, Jonathan |
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind. |
| Syrus, Publilius |
As men, we are all equal in the presence of death. |
| Syrus, Publilius |
The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself. |
| "The Neurotic's Notebook" |
The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine. |
| Thoreau, Henry David |
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident - it is as common as life. |
| Twain, Mark |
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live. |
| Twain, Mark |
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. |
| Twain, Mark |
The report of my death was an exaggeration. |
| Ussher, Percival Arland |
A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man. |
| Van Dyke, Henry |
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live. |
| Walker, Alice |
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. |
| Wilde, Oscar |
I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means. |
| Williams, Tennessee |
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation. |
| Worton, Henry |
He first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him: liked it not, and died. |
| Wright, Steven |
I intend to live forever. So far, so good. |
| Yee, Rodney |
As we look deeply within, we understand our perfect balance. There is no fear of the cycle of birth, life and death. For when you stand in the present moment, you are timeless. |
| Yevtushenko, Yevgeny |
In any man who dies there dies with him
His first snow and kiss and fight...
Not people die but worlds die in them. |
| Young, Edward |
Our birth is nothing but our death begun. |
