Death Quotes

“There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.”

— Aeschylus

“Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

— Edvard Munch

“Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.”

— Herodotus

“Death is nothing; but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“Pale death beats equally at the poor man's gate and at the palaces of kings.”

— Horace

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.”

— Woody Allen

“You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours.”

— Yogi Berra

“I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons.”

— Douglas Adams

“Sleep is lovely. Death is better still. Not to have been born is, of course, the miracle.”

— Heinrich Heine

“Early this morning I signed my death warrant.”

— Michael Collins

“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”

— Katharine Hepburn

“I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.”

— Johnny Carson

“The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

— William Wordsworth

“War is never fatal but always lost; always lost.”

— Gertrude Stein

“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.”

— George Eliot

“A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.”

— John Steinbeck

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

— Albert Camus

“For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”

— Khalil Gibran

“There is no such thing as inner peace; there is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.”

— Fran Lebowitz

“We die only once, and for such a long time.”

— Molière

“In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me without hurrying.”

— Jean Cocteau

“Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.”

— Emily Brontë

“I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

— Mark Twain

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

— D.H. Lawrence

“The idea is to die young as late as possible.”

— Ashley Montagu

“I am not going to die, I'm going home like a shooting star.”

— Sojourner Truth

“How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.”

— C.S. Lewis

“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”

— Franz Kafka

“Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

— John Donne

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Death, like birth, is a secret of nature.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.”

— Honoré de Balzac

“I intend to live forever. So far, so good.”

— Steven Wright

“After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.”

— King George V

“I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man.”

— Che Guevara

“Only the dead have seen the end of the war.”

— George Santayana

“You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us?”

— J.K. Rowling

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”

— Norman Cousins

“War would end if the dead could return.”

— Stanley Baldwin

“Death is just life's next big adventure.”

— J.K. Rowling

“The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.”

— Bruce Lee

“It is not only the living who are killed in war.”

— Isaac Asimov

“Tears are the silent language of grief.”

— Voltaire

“Music is essentially useless, as is life.”

— George Santayana

“No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”

— Plato

“If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.”

— George Burns

“Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“When we have lost everything including hope, life becomes a disgrace and death a duty.”

— W.C. Fields

“We enter the world alone; we leave the world alone.”

— James Anthony Froude

“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

— Joseph Stalin

“Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod.”

— Aristophanes

“My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.”

— Huey Newton

“Our life is made by the death of others.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

“I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born, but as the joke goes, very few people succeed in it.”

— Slavoj Žižek

“A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.”

— Alexander the Great

“Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.”

— Mark Twain

“Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?”

— William Butler Yeats

“A man is born alone and dies alone, and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone, and he goes alone to hell or the supreme abode.”

— Chanakya

“In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”

— Neville Chamberlain

“In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.”

— Herodotus

“The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, which hurts and is desired.”

— William Shakespeare

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“Death is the veil which those who live call life; they sleep and it is lifted.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.”

— Lao Tzu

“We could have been killed or worse, expelled.”

— We Could Have Been Killed or Worse Expelled

“God's finger touched him, and he slept.”

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

“A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier times.”

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.”

— John Derek

“The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

— William Shakespeare

“Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“It is not the length of life, but the depth of life.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”

— Franz Kafka

“The goal of all life is death.”

— Sigmund Freud

“Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.”

— Douglas MacArthur

“I am dying, Egypt, dying.”

— Marc Antony

“I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.”

— Nancy Reagan

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

— William Butler Yeats

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

— Plato

“I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.”

— Corazon Aquino

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.”

— Isaac Asimov

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

— Charles de Gaulle

“In war, you win or lose, live or die, and the difference is just an eyelash.”

— Douglas MacArthur

“When I die, I shall soar with angels; and when I die to the angels, what I shall become you cannot imagine.”

— Rumi

“Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven.”

— Confucius

“Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep; and yet a third of life is passed in sleep.”

— Lord Byron

“All things are subject to decay, and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.”

— John Dryden

“There is no morality in war; morality is the privilege of those judging from the distance. War is only death and destruction.”

— John Cory

“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

“I am about to take my last voyage; a great leap in the dark.”

— Thomas Hobbes

“The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

“The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.”

— Albert Einstein

“Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground.”

— John Lennon

“Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”

— Plato

“Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

— Douglas MacArthur

“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life; the living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“I am God's wheat, and I shall be ground by the teeth of beasts, that I may become the pure bread of Christ.”

— Ignatius of Antioch

“Cowards die many times before their actual deaths.”

— William Shakespeare

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

— William Shakespeare

“A person doesn't die when he should, but when he can.”

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“I can imagine myself on my death bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.”

— Aleister Crowley

“The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.”

— Joseph Stalin

“Words do not pay for my dead people.”

— Chief Joseph

“You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”

— Epictetus

“After your death you will be what you were before your birth.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“Death is the solution to all problems: no man, no problem.”

— Joseph Stalin

“Dying is easy. It's living that scares me to death.”

— Annie Lennox

“War is hell.”

— William Tecumseh Sherman

“Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.”

— Lao Tzu

“We feel and know that we are eternal.”

— Baruch Spinoza

“The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.”

— Albert Schweitzer

“Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here; and when it does come, we no longer exist.”

— Epicurus

“I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.”

— Isaac Asimov

“Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

— Walt Whitman

“Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours.”

— Yogi Berra

“My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.”

— Wilfred Owen

“I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.”

— Elon Musk

“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.”

— François de La Rochefoucauld

“Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

— John Donne

“Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.”

— Tecumseh

“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

— Joseph Stalin

“Call no man happy until he is dead, but only lucky.”

— Solon

“They say death acquits us of all obligations.”

— Michel de Montaigne

“Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain's ready room died, it was always a sad moment.”

— Patrick Stewart

“Smoking kills; if you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life.”

— Brooke Shields

“Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”

— Plato

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

— Blaise Pascal

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died; rather we should thank God that such men lived.”

— George S. Patton

“The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life.”

— Lucan

“Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death; that's all.”

— William Goldman

“Nothing in life is promised except death.”

— Kanye West

“The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

— T.S. Eliot

“All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story teller who would keep that from you.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

— T.S. Eliot

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Life is wasted on the living.”

— Douglas Adams

“Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?”

— Plato

“I give the fight up; let there be an end—a privacy, an obscure nook for me! I want to be forgotten even by God.”

— Robert Browning

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

— John Keats

“In modern war, you will die like a dog for no good reason.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.”

— Arthur Koestler

“Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven.”

— Confucius

“Generally speaking, the way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.”

— Miyamoto Musashi

“As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

“Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.”

— Coco Chanel

“A human being is only breath and shadow.”

— Sophocles

“Marriage is the death of hope.”

— Woody Allen

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

— J.K. Rowling

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me.”

— George Orwell

“Alas! I am dying beyond my means.”

— Oscar Wilde

“A man does not die of love, or his liver, or even of old age; he dies of being a man.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

“Life is hard; then you die; then they throw dirt in your face; then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.”

— David Gerrold

“Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.”

— Tecumseh

“If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.”

— Michelangelo

“War is war; the only good human being is a dead one.”

— George Orwell

“You haven't lost anything when you know where it is. Death can hide but not divide.”

— Vance Havner

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Death is not the greatest loss in life; the greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”

— Norman Cousins

“The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague; who shall say where the one ends and where the other begins?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

“Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.”

— Wallace Stevens

“I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians.”

— Alexander the Great

“Death is a fearful thing.”

— William Shakespeare

“O death, rock me asleep, bring me to quiet rest; let pass my weary, guiltless ghost out of my careful breast.”

— Anne Boleyn

“Be thou comforted, little dog; thou too, in resurrection, shalt have a little golden tail.”

— Martin Luther

“Death is the sanction of everything; the storyteller can tell he has borrowed his authority from death.”

— Walter Benjamin

“War means fighting, and fighting means killing.”

— Nathan Bedford Forrest

“Sleep is good; death is better; but of course the best thing would be to have never been born at all.”

— Heinrich Heine

“In the long run we are all dead.”

— John Maynard Keynes

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

— Mark Twain

“Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“When I die, I hope to go to heaven—whatever the hell that is.”

— Ayn Rand

“Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.”

— Maurice Chevalier

“The spirit desires to remain with its body because without the organic instruments of that body it can neither act nor feel anything.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

“Whom the gods love dies young.”

— Menander

“Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.”

— Martin Luther

“First our pleasures die, and then our hopes, and then our fears; and when these are dead, the debt is due; dust claims dust, and we die too.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.”

— Bertolt Brecht

“Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.”

— Socrates

“All men's souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.”

— Socrates

“Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

— Edvard Munch

“The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

“I am prepared to meet my Maker; whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”

— Winston Churchill

“Pale death with impartial step knocks at the hut of the poor and the towers of kings.”

— Horace

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

“Let no one weep for me or celebrate my funeral with mourning, for I still live as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.”

— Quintus Ennius

Death Quotes

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