Death Quotes

Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.

Alexander Maclaren

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.

Arthur Schopenhauer

He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.

Leo Tolstoy

I spent millons of years in the worldof inorganic thingsas a star, as a rock...Then I died and became a plant--Forgetting my former existencebecause of its othernessThen I died and became an animal--Forgetting my life as a plantexcept for inclinations in the seasonof spring and sweet herbs--like the inclination of babestoward their mother's breastThen I died and became a humanMy intelligence ripened, awakeningfrom greed and self-seekingto become wise and knowingI behold a hundred thousandintelligences most marvelousand remember my former statesand inclinationsAnd when I die againI will soar past the angelsto places I cannot imagineNow, what have I ever lost by dying?

Rumi, What Have I Ever Lost By D

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, 'There she goes!' Gone where? Gone from my sight ... that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There she goes!' there are other eyes watching her coming and their voices ready to take up the glad shouts 'Here she comes!'

Henry Van Dyke, A Parable of Imm

I am going to seek a great purpose, draw the curtain, the farce is played.

Francois Rabelais

We should weep for men at their birth, not at their death.

Charles Montesquieu

Virtue alone has majesty in death.

Edward Young

The darkness of death is like the evening twilight; it makes all objects appear more lovely to the dying.

Jean Paul Richter

We are all dead men on leave.

Eugene Levine

Death is the final wake-up call.

Doug Horton

Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.

Jean de La Fontaine

A human act once set in motion flows on forever to the great account. Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are.

George Meredith

Thank Heaven! the crisis --The danger, is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last --, and the fever called Living is conquered at last.

Edgar Allan Poe

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.

Thomas Browne

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

Josef Stalin

I wouldn't feel satisfied being on set every day doing a romantic comedy - I'd be bored to death.

Joaquin Phoenix

Death is an unsurpassable limit of human existence...We discover the relationship which is the basis for all feelings of reverance, fear, awe, wonder, sorrow, and deference in the face of something greater and more powerful...Only such a being-unto-death can guarantee the precondition that the Dasein be able to free itself from its absorption in, its submission and surrender of itself to the things and relationships of everyday living and to return to itself.

Medard Boss

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

William Lloyd Garrison