In Memoriam Quotes to Ponder

Guest Author - Guest Editor

"The only thing you take with you when you're gone is what you leave behind."
-- John Allston
"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
"The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live."
-- Dr. 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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"He that lives to forever, never fears dying."
-- William Penn
"Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names."
-- Proverb
"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."
-- Sir 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
"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
"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
"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 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