Quotations About Death I

Death, the sable smoke where vanishes the flame. ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath. ~John Donne



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. ~Albert Einstein


Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. ~Socrates


In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight....
Not people die but worlds die in them.
~Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "People"


Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go. ~Jean de La Fontaine


Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time. ~Attributed to George Carlin


Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death. ~Erik H. Erikson


Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men. ~Herodotus


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. ~Marcel Proust


We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. ~Madame de Stael


Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. ~Norman Cousins


The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Death is a debt we all must pay. ~Euripides

People living deeply have no fear of death. ~Anaiïs Nin, Diary, 1967


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. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man


Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in. ~George Bernard Shaw


I knew a man who once said, "death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back." ~From the movie Gladiator


Our birth is nothing but our death begun. ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts


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. ~Plato


For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
~Kahlil Gibran, from "The Prophet"


Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor. ~Homer, Iliad


Death is the surest calculation that can be made. ~Ludwig B�chner, Force and Matter


The goal of all life is death. ~Sigmund Freud


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. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations


And they die an equal death - the idler and the man of mighty deeds. ~Homer, Iliad



As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death. ~Leonardo da Vinci


There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death. ~Harvey Cushing


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. ~Stewart Alsop


Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees. ~J.J. Furnas