Death Quotations - Quotations

"Death is the opening of a more subtle life. In the flower, it sets free the perfume; in the chrysalis, the butterfly; in man, the soul."
--Juliette Adam
"I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear. "
-- Woody Allen
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it by not dying!"
-- Woody Allen
"It's impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune."
-- Woody Allen
"The only thing you take with you when you're gone is what you leave behind."
-- John Allston
"I answer the heroic question "Death, where is they sting?" with "It is here in my heart and mind and memories."
--Maya Angelou
"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."
-- Francis Bacon
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
-- Dave Barry
"Now comes the mystery."
-- Henry Ward Beecher
"Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways."
--Stephen Vincent Benet
"Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."
-- Bible - Genesis 3:19
"Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh."
-- Robert Bolt
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
"The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live."
-- Joan Borysenko
"He who dies a thousand deaths meets the final hour with the calmness of one who approaches a well remembered door."
-- Heywood Brown
"Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely."
-- Buddha
"Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds."
-- Buddha
"Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile."
-- Julie Burchill
"To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die."
--Thomas Campbell
"I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain."
-- Joyce Cary
"I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived."
-- Willa Cather
"I am ready to meet my maker, but whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
-- Winston Churchill
"Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console."
--Charles C. Colton
"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."
--Norman Cousins
"Our life is made by the death of others."
-- Leonardo da Vinci
"On a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"Science says: "We must live," and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: "We must die," and seeks how to make us die well."
-- Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo
"Unable are the Loved to die - For Love is Immortality."
-- Emily Dickinson
"This world is the land of the dying; the next is the land of the living."
--Tyron Edwards
"Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What greater pain could mortals have than this: To see their children dead before their eyes?"
-- Euripedes
"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
"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
-- Susan Ertz
"We who are left how shall we look again Happily on the sun or feel the rain Without remembering how they who went Ungrudgingly and spent Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?"
-- Wilfred Wilson Gibson
"Come, for the House of Hope is built on sand: bring wine, for the fabric of life is as weak as the wind."
-- Häfiz
"I regret that I have but one life to give for my country."
-- Nathan Hale
"He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt."
-- J. Heller
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!"
-- Patrick Henry
"How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty."
-- Eric Hoffer
"Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Tis after death that we measure men."
-- James Barron Hope
"To stop sinning suddenly."
-- Elbert Hubbard
"In the democracy of the dead all men at last are equal. There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave."
-- John James Ingalls
"A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own."
-- Thomas Mann
"Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it."
-- W. Somerset Maugham
"Death teaches us to live; it gives us a boundary to map our living within. Death's hammer breaks through the mirror separating us from light."
--David Meltzer
"Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good."
-- William Mitford
"Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved."
-- Iris Murdoch
"We were born to die and we die to live. As seedlings of God, we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven."
-- Russell M. Nelson
"I am become death, shatterer of worlds."
-- Robert J. Oppenheimer
"How could they tell?"
-- Dorothy Parker, upon hearing that President Coolidge had died
"He that lives to forever, never fears dying."
-- William Penn
"Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names."
-- Proverb
"There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for."
-- Tom Robbins
"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."
-- Bertrand Russell
"Most people would rather die than think: many do."
-- Bertrand Russell
"Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives."
-- A. Sachs
"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. "
-- George Santayana
"Death--the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening."
-- Walter Scott
"A punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor."
-- Seneca
"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."
-- William Shakespeare
"Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple...Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"Everything is drive-through. In California, they even have a burial service called Jump-In-The-Box."
-- Wil Shriner
"Death is the gate of life."
--St. Bernard of Clairvaux
"The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone."
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe
"Birth and death are like ships: why do we rejoice over a ship setting out on a journey when we know not the she may encounter on the seas? We should rejoice when the ship returns safely to the port."
--Midrash Tanhuma
"Early to rise and early to bed. Makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead."
-- James Thurber
"I'm not going to die, I'm going home Like a shooting star."
--Sojourner Truth
"A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential"-there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost...It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster."
-- Mark Twain
"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."
-- Mark Twain
"I want to die in my sleep like my friend.... Not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car."
-- Unknown
"Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live."
-- Henry Van Dyke
"They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead, That all of thee we loved and cherished Has with thy summer roses perished; And left, as its young beauty fled, An ashen memory in its stead."
-- John Greenleaf Whittier
"I think of death as some delightful journey that I shall take when all my tasks are done."
--Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street."
-- Virginia Woolf
"It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees."
-- Emiliano Zapata

	Heather O'Neil BellaOnline's Quotations Editor