Death great immortal quotes, a collection of excellent aphorisms by various famous authors about the most critical and troublesome mystery of our poor existence.
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
Fred A. Allen
Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
Book of Common Prayer
Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It’s a palliative. The remedy is death.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
Thinking of death and the coldness of his bodies, I even feel like sweating a little.
Carl William Brown
But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Our lives are a mixture of different roles. Most of us are doing the best we can to find whatever the right balance is… For me, that balance is family, work, and service.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
Samuel Johnson
‘Tis all a Checker-board of Nights and days where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates and slays, and one by one back in the Closet lays.
Omar Khayyam
Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen
D. H. Lawrence
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
After the end of time, mother, we will find ourselves in the reality that does not exist, in the world that is not; we will be happy, serene, at peace, and finally we will be able to enjoy what we are not.
Carl William Brown
Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and
Pier Paolo Pasolini
No rose is without thorns.
Afghani Proverb
A wooden bed is better than a golden coffin.
Russian Proverb
I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I’m in the wrong building.
Charles Shulz
When you were born you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die, the world cried and you rejoice.
Old Indian Saying
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.
William Shakespeare
If it were not for death to spur us, all our art, poetry, but above all science and philosophy would certainly be much more insignificant.
Carl William Brown
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass.
Hester Piozzi Thrale
Nothing is truer in a sense than a funeral oration: It tells precisely what dead man should have been.
Gustave Vapereau
Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.
Edward Young
See in what peace a Christian can die.
Joseph Addison
The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.
Joseph Addison
I don’t believe in an after life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
Woody Allen
The keywords of death: disbelief, anger, pain, resignation, mourning, funeral, cemetery, suffering, memories, sadness, melancholy, anguish, inevitability, absurdity, past, photographs, dreams, nightmares, afterlife, religion, power, exploitation, indifference.
Carl William Brown
I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily as lying down.
Woody Allen
There are three kinds of death in this world. There’s heart death, there’s brain death, and there’s being off the network.
Guy Almes
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.
Steward Alsop
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
Hannah Arendt
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
The moments of happiness… We have had the experience, but we have missed the meaning, as Eliot said. Or rather, we have not realized it, so life has passed and in the end I have nothing left but the pain of losing the dearest person, my mother.
Carl William Brown
Nothing that is really good and God-like dies.
Ernest Moritz Arndt
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
Matthew Arnold
Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, ye shall find yourselves again.
Matthew Arnold
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden
To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.
Red Auerbach
Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.
Marcus Aurelius
Death has freed my father from his evils and has imprisoned me even more in mine.
Carl William Brown
Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.
Marcus Aurelius
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
Francis Bacon
It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.
Francis Bacon
It is natural to die as to be born.
Francis Bacon
It is natural to die as to be born.
Francis Bacon
Death always waits. The door of the hearse is never closed.
Joseph Bayly
Loss and possession, Death and life are one. There falls no shadow where There shines no sun.
Hilaire Belloc
Ah, death, one of my most illustrious ancestors.
Carl William Brown
As for death one gets used to it, even if it’s only other people’s death you get used to.
Enid Bagnold
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
James Baldwin
When one by one our ties are torn, and friend from friend is snatched forlorn; When man is left alone to mourn, oh! then how sweet it is to die!
Anna Letitia Barbauld
I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life. Death was like love, a romantic escape. I took pills because I didn’t want to throw myself off my balcony and know people would photograph me lying dead below.
Brigitte Bardot
To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!
Clive Barker
The best place a person can die, is where they die for others.
James M. Barrie
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
James M. Barrie
Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.
John Barrymore
Let no man fear to die, we love to sleep all, and death is but the sounder sleep.
Francis Beaumont
There’s a thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die; their silence.
Ben Becht
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.
Samuel Beckett
Death is the dropping of the flower that the fruit may swell.
Henry Ward Beecher
The death that grieves us most is that of our parents, our children, our loved ones; ours does not afflict us that much and that of others even brings us a slight pleasure, consoling us.
Carl William Brown
Living is death; dying is life. We are not what we appear to be. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that citizens; on this side orphans, on that children;
Henry Ward Beecher
Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.
Yogi Berra
Death is as sure for that which is born as birth is for that which is dead. Therefore grieve not for what is inevitable.
Bhagavad Gita
You must not fear death, my lads; defy him, and you drive him into the enemy’s ranks.
Napoleon Bonaparte
How long after you are gone will ripples remain as evidence that you were cast into the pool of life?
Grant M. Bright
My life seems like a filthy vacation in a squalid hotel in a miserable resort, when death comes it will be time to start working.
Carl William Brown
Most of us die with much of our beautiful music still in us, un-sung, un-played.
Grant M. Bright
No one’s death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.
Hermann Broch
Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.
Emily Bronte
Death is the cure for all diseases.
Sir Thomas Browne
From now on I want to imagine death as a tender and affectionate mother who with extreme love, holding me smiling to her breast for all eternity, instead of giving me life will take it away.
Carl William Brown
Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.
Sir Thomas Browne
Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.
Sir Thomas Browne
I don’t like voices that are too sweet and persuasive, they invite relaxation and induce calm, they evoke rest, which reminds me of sleep, which calls me to death, which finally pushes me to kill.
Carl William Brown
We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
Sir Thomas Browne
For ‘Tis not in mere death that men die most.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
All that tread, the globe are but a handful to the tribes, that slumber in its bosom.
William C. Bryant
All that tread, the globe are but a handful to the tribes, that slumber in its bosom.
William C. Bryant
I’d rather die while I’m living then live while I’m dead.
Jimmy Buffet
If life must not be taken too seriously — then so neither must death.
Samuel Butler
For Eliot April is the cruelest month, and I agreed, in fact my father died in April, but then my mother passed away in October, so now the cruelest months are certainly two.
Carl William Brown
The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.
Samuel Butler
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
Samuel Butler
To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.
Samuel Butler
Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, and yet a third of life is passed in sleep.
Lord Byron
For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast. And the heart must pause to breathe, and love itself have rest.
Lord Byron
I have seen a thousand graves opened, and always perceived that whatever was gone, the teeth and hair remained of those who had died with them. Is not this odd? They go the very first things in youth and yet last the longest in the dust.
Lord Byron
Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
Albert Camus
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
Albert Camus
Jesus Christ, he didn’t even seem like a dead person, and death seemed to have even given him a little more life, depriving him of all his suffering and at the same time giving him a mystical serenity! But his pain had not gone far, just look at my face.
Carl William Brown
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
Albert Camus
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
Albert Camus
He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.
Elias Canetti
I would like to die a poor man.
Chester F. Carlson
For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.
Johnny Carson
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
‘Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o’er the pate, or a kick of the guts; to go out like the snuff of a farthing candle, and die merely of the mulligrubs, or the sullens.
Miguel De Cervantes
It is precisely those who fear death the most who try to make the existence of others increasingly unlivable.
Carl William Brown
Well, there’s a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.
Miguel De Cervantes
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.
Raymond Chandler
Woe, woe, woe… in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
Raymond Chandler
He had been, he said, an unconscionable time dying; but he hoped that they would excuse it.
Charles II
You cannot live without lawyers, and certainly you cannot die without them.
Joseph H. Choate
We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of the scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.
Deepak Chopra
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
My mother gave me life and when she died she also took it away from me, so spirits and memories are the only things left.
Carl William Brown
That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place.
Marcus T. Cicero
The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
Marcus T. Cicero
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Jean Cocteau
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Jean Cocteau
An orphan’s curse would drag to hell, a spirit from on high; but oh! more horrible than that, is a curse in a dead man’s eye!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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 Caleb Colton
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat.
Joseph Conrad
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
Norman Cousins
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Death cannot be fought, we cannot see in it a fatal enemy; death is too strong, the more you fight it the more it enjoys itself.
Carl William Brown
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
Leonardo Da Vinci
These have not the hope to die.
Alighieri, Dante
I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.
Clarence Darrow
I am not the least afraid to die.
Charles Darwin
To be born free is an accident; To live free a responsibility; To die free is an obligation.
Mrs Hubbard Davis
Few cross the river of time and are able to reach non-being. Most of them run up and down only on this side of the river. But those who when they know the law follow the path of the law, they shall reach the other shore and go beyond the realm of death.
Dhammapada
The human race has no respect for itself or for the planet it inhabits because it knows that its destiny is one of death and destruction and therefore it knows that living in an illogical universe, it is not worth building a logic.
Carl William Brown
The traveler has reached the end of the journey! In the freedom of the infinite he is free from all sorrows, the fetters that bound him are thrown away, and the burning fever of life is no more.
Dhammapada
He would make a lovely corpse.
Charles Dickens
Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.
Emily Dickinson
Death is a dialogue between the spirit and the dust.
Emily Dickinson
Dying is a wild night and a new road.
Emily Dickinson
Birth and death are great phenomena, it is life that is a great nonsense.
Carl William Brown
Let us go in; the fog is rising.
Emily Dickinson
The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.
Denis Diderot
As grand and griefless as a rich man’s funeral.
Sidney Thompson Dobell
When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin.
J. P. Donleavy
As virtuous men pass mildly away, and whisper to their souls to go, whilst some of their sad friends do say, the breath goes now, and some say no.
John Donne
Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
John Donne
If a strong desire for honesty, equality and love does not take possession of you, you will come to a squalid and miserable end, it will be your intellectual death.
Carl William Brown
When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
John Donne
Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
All human things are subject to decay, and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.
John Dryden
He was exhaled; his great Creator drew His spirit, as the sun the morning dew.
John Dryden
Like pilgrims to the appointed place we tend; The world’s an inn, and death the journey’s end.
John Dryden
To die is landing on some distant shore.
John Dryden
I’m trying to die correctly, but it’s very difficult, you know.
Lawrence Durrell
The last suit that you wear, you don’t need any pockets.
Wayne Dyer
Death is the last enemy. Once we’ve gotten past that, I think everything will be all right.
Alice Thomas Ellis
Let death be daily before your eyes, and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.
Epictetus
He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein
Only those who fear death need to believe in God, to govern, to get rich; all this in fact makes them feel immortal.
Carl William Brown
Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
George Eliot
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
George Eliot
When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.
George Eliot
And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T. S. Eliot
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Epicurus
It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men all live in a city without walls.
Epicurus
The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.
Epicurus
Remember man as you walk by, as you are now so once was I, as I am now, so you will be, so prepare for death and follow me.
Epitaph
But learn that to die is a debt we must all pay.
Euripides
A rich idiot, rather than see the many evils of society and contribute to healing them, will much prefer a slow and painful death.
Carl William Brown
We all have to die some day, if we live long enough.
Dave Farber
It hath often been said that it is not death but dying that is terrible.
Henry Fielding
It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.
Henry Fielding
W. C. Fields, a lifetime agnostic, was discovered reading a Bible on his deathbed. “I’m looking for a loop-hole,” he explained.
W. C. Fields
Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.
Edward M. Forster
The pride of dying rich raises the loudest laugh in hell.
John W. Foster
I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.
Benjamin Franklin
Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.
Benjamin Franklin
Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.
Benjamin Franklin
Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
Charles Frohman
Plan for this world as if you expect to live forever; but plan for the hereafter as if you expect to die tomorrow.
Ibn Gabirol
If slaves did not fear death, either there would be no slavery, or there would be no slaves.
Carl William Brown
Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.
Andre Gide
Death is the only inescapable, unavoidable, sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we’re born.
Gary Mark Gilmore
A useless life is an early death.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Death is a commingling of eternity with time. In the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The reason so many people turned up at his funeral is that they wanted to make sure he was dead.
Samuel Goldwyn
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
William Hazlitt
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Thomas Gray
We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
Graham Greene
Man has the possibility of existence after death. But possibility is one thing and the realization of the possibility is quite a different thing.
George Gurdjieff
The death of what’s dead is the birth of what’s living.
Arlo Guthrie
Oh you who have been removed from God in his solitude by the abyss of time, how can you expect to reach him without dying?
Hallaj
I never think he is quite ready for another world who is altogether weary of this.
Hugh Hamilton
It is said that since philosophers can do nothing against death, it is better to become insurance agents.
Carl William Brown
If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party.
Dag Hammarskjold
In the last analysis it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions life puts to us.
Dag Hammarskjold
Your body must become familiar with its death — in all its possible forms and degrees — as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.
Dag Hammarskjold
To leave is to die a little… one leaves behind a little of oneself at any hour, at any place.
Edmond Haracourt
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Rutger Hauer
You haven’t lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.
Vance Havner
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The company that continues to invest against death in the pursuit of profit is destined to fail.
Carl William Brown
Death cancels everything but trut, and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred — it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death is the greatest
William Hazlitt
Don’t strew me with roses after I’m dead. When Death claims the light of my brow No flowers of life will cheer me: instead You may give me my roses now!
Thomas F. Healey
Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.
Martin Heidegger
When I die, I want people to play my music, go wild and freak out and do anything they want to do.
Jimi Hendrix
Madam, Life’s a piece in bloom death goes dogging everywhere: She’s the tenant of the room he’s the ruffian on the stair.
William Ernest Henley
Only the young die good.
Oliver Herford
Death is like an arrow that is already in flight, and your life lasts only until it reaches you.
Georg Hermes
Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.
Herodotus
The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
Hermann Hesse
Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.
Eric Hoffer
How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
Eric Hoffer
It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.
Eric Hoffer
A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.
Sydney Hook
‘Tis after death that we measure men.
James Barron Hope
I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.
Horace
Pale death with an impartial foot knocks at the hovels of the poor and the palaces of king.
Horace
It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.
Thomas Horder
The insurance agent is a true philosopher, in fact he always reflects on chance and death frequently enters into his speeches.
Carl William Brown
Death is feared as birth is forgotten.
Doug Horton
Death is the final wake-up call.
Doug Horton
To awake from death is to die in peace.
Doug Horton
To stop sinning suddenly.
Elbert Hubbard
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
Aldous Huxley
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Aldous Huxley
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 J. Ingalls
The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can’t tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?
Alice James
Death? It is not a problem for those who have never lived, and there are many of them.
Carl William Brown
I’m not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.
Derek Jarman
We are but tenants and shortly the great landlord will give us notice that our lease has expired.
Joseph Jefferson
I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.
Samuel Johnson
It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.
Samuel Johnson
There is not, perhaps, to a mind well instructed, a more painful occurrence, than the death of one we have injured without reparation.
Samuel Johnson
The Father is the Giver of Life; but the Mother is the Giver of Death, because her womb is the gate of ingress to matter, and through her life is ensouled to form, and no form can be either infinite or eternal. Death is implicit in birth.
Kabbalah
Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
John Keats
When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.
John Keats
Life is a chronic disease that can only be cured by death.
Carl William Brown
Teach me to live that I may dread, the grave as little as my bed.
Thomas Ken
In the long run we are all dead.
John Maynard Keynes
The essential part of our being can only survive if the transient part dissolves. Death is a condition of survival. That which has been gained must be eternalized, and can only be eternalized by being transmuted, by passing through death they must return
Pir Vilayat Khan
Because of its tremendous solemnity, death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances.
Soren Kierkegaard
If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Death is like a long sleep, only you can’t dream it, but at least there is no risk of some pain in the ass coming to wake you up.
Carl William Brown
It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
If some persons died, and others did not die, death would be a terrible affliction.
Jean De La Bruyere
Death never takes the wise man by surprise. He is always ready to go.
Jean De La Fontaine
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
I detest life-insurance agents; they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.
Stephen B. Leacock
But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet. Lessen like sound of friends departing feet; And death is beautiful as feet of friend. Coming with welcome at our journey’s end.
James Russell Lowell
We need not fear life, because God is the Ruler of all and we need not fear death, because He shares immortality with us.
Ann Landers
I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Walter Savage Landor
The pomp of death is far more terrible than death itself.
Nathaniel Lee
Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.
Douglas Macarthur
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart. Eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
Thomas Merton
The world is the mirror of myself dying.
Henry Miller
Evil exists because ignorance exists, otherwise life and death are not evil.
Carl William Brown
Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
Brave Heart Movie
We are all dead men on leave.
Eugene Levine
If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?
C. S. Lewis
It is hard to have patience with people who say “There is no death” or “Death doesn’t matter.” There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.
C. S. Lewis
I stay a little longer, as one stays, to cover up the embers that still burn.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Death is the only safe means of escape from an absurd world, all other methods do not allow appreciable results; therefore since we are all prisoners, for the most charitable the time has come to help their neighbor.
Carl William Brown
The course of my long life hath reached at last in fragile bark over a tempestuous sea the common harbor, where must rendered be account for all the actions of the past.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When a great man dies, for years the light he leaves behind him, lies on the paths of men.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.
James Russell Lowell
The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life.
F. L. Lucan
By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.
Lucretius
Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.
Martin Luther
At death we cross from one territory to another, but we’ll have no trouble with visas. Our representative is already there, preparing for our arrival. As citizens of heaven, our entrance is incontestable.
Erwin W. Lutzer
How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.
George MacDonald
There is no such thing as death. In nature nothing dies. From each sad remnant of decay, some forms of life arise, so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.
Charles MacKay
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
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
Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.
Paul De Man
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
Thomas Mann
Although, as Mark Twain argued, humor is born from pain, an unrequited love can hardly generate humor, just as the death of a loved one does not. Let’s say that there is some truth in Twain’s thesis, but the issue is much more complex.
Carl William Brown
A person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.
Andrew Marvell
Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.
Groucho Marx
Death doesn’t affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn’t concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
W. Somerset Maugham
There is no death. The stars go down to rise upon some other shore. And bright in Heaven’s jeweled crown, they shine forevermore.
John Luckey McCreery
Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
Herman Melville
At birth man is offered only one choice — the choice of his death. But if this choice is governed by distaste for his own existence, his life will never have been more than meaningless.
Jean-Pierre Melville
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
In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.
Henry Miller
Death is delightful. Death is dawn, the waking from a weary night of fevers unto truth and light.
Joaquin Miller
Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity.
John Milton
How gladly would I meet mortality, my sentence, and be earth in sensible! how glad would lay me down, as in my mother’s lap! There I should rest, and sleep secure.
John Milton
Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.
William Mitford
Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
What is death but a long sleep, and I like to sleep.
Carl William Brown
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. My advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
I want death to find me planting my cabbage
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
The great philosopher Cesare Beccaria was against torture and the death penalty; I would instead be for reinstating them, in favor of the judges, of course.
Carl William Brown
It is not death that alarms me, but dying.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
We should weep for men at their birth, not at their death.
Charles De Montesquieu
Yet nightly pitch my moving tent, a day’s march nearer home.
James Montgomery
Death may be the King of terrors… but Jesus is the King of kings!
Dwight L. Moody
I hate funerals and would not attend my own if it could be avoided. But it is well for every man to stop once in a while to think of what sort of a collection of mourners he is training for his final event.
Robert T. Morris
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
Hector Hugh Munro
So that he seemed not to relinquish life, but to leave one home for another.
Cornelius Nepos
So that he seemed not to relinquish life, but to leave one home for another.
Cornelius Nepos
One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Try never to be obedient. Of course, make an exception for death.
Carl William Brown
There is a remedy for everything; it is called death.
Portuguese Proverb
We all of us waited for him to die. The family sent him a check every month, and hoped he’d get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss.
John Osborne
An evil life is a kind of death.
Ovid
If only I could understand the reason for my crying. If only I could stop this fear of dreaming that I’m dying.
Laura Palmer
Die, my dear doctor! That’s the last thing I shall do!
Lord Palmerston
He that lives forever, never fears dying.
William Penn
He has gone over to the majority.
Petronius
He has gone over to the majority.
Petronius
O how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living.
Philip II
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.
Sylvia Plath
Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?
Plato
Mafia-style death threats to a wealthy entrepreneur in the press and beyond. Let’s hope they come to fruition soon.
Carl William Brown
No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
Plato
He whom the Gods love dies young, while he is in health, has his senses and his judgments sound.
Titus Maccius Plautus
Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.
Plutarch
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
Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.
Alexander Pope
Death doesn’t frighten me.
Princess Diana
If your time ain’t come not even a doctor can kill you.
American Proverb
Death was afraid of him because he had the heart of a lion.
Arabian Proverb
Eros and Thanatos, life drive and death drive, and who will stupidity be with? Maybe it will split!
Carl William Brown
Life is a dream walking, death is going home.
Chinese Proverb
Death always comes too early or too late.
English Proverb
Death is a shadow that always follows the body.
English Proverb
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.
Italian Proverb
Our last garment is made without pockets.
Italian Proverb
Every man goes down to his death bearing in his hands only that which he has given away.
Persian Proverb
Death is a black camel that lies down at every door. Sooner or later you must ride the camel.
Turkish Proverb
It’s astonishing how important a man becomes when he dies.
Yiddish Proverb
Death has power over many things, practically almost everything, obviously except stupidity.
Carl William Brown
I am going to seek a great purpose, draw the curtain, the farce is played.
Francois Rabelais
I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.
Ernest Renan
So little done, so much to do.
Cecil Rhodes
Death gives us sleep, eternal youth, and immortality.
Jean Paul Richter
The darkness of death is like the evening twilight; it makes all objects appear more lovely to the dying.
Jean Paul Richter
Death is a distant rumor to the young.
Andy Rooney
And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.
Christina Rossetti
Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet; and if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget.
Christina Rossetti
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
Philip Roth
You just can’t complain about being alive. It’s self-indulgent to be unhappy. [When asked how she has coped since husband’s death.]
Gena Rowland
As Milton wrote, the people should have the sacrosanct right to condemn any despot to death, but alas, the teaching of the great poet is not always passed down.
Carl William Brown
I died a mineral and became a plant. I died a plant and rose an animal. I died an animal, and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Jalal-Uddin Rumi
One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
John Ruskin
Most people would rather die than think: many do.
Bertrand Russell
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.
A. Sachs
One approaches the journey’s end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.
George Sand
There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
I do not see why we should condemn those who give more dignity and value to the variable death than to the variable life.
Carl William Brown
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and sleep a little dearth.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
William Shakespeare
Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
George Bernard Shaw
For the dead there are no more toils.
Sophocles
That which is so universal as death must be a benefit.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller
What shall he fear that does not fear death.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller
Come he slow or come he fast. It is but death who comes at last.
Sir Walter Scott
Is death the last step? No, it is the final awakening.
Sir Walter Scott
Have you decided to commit suicide? Call me, I can give meaning to your death. As you say, you do not have my number, but it is simple, ask the publisher for it or leave a message on the answering machine of the association for the fight against stupidity.
Carl William Brown
The white man’s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man.
Chief Seattle
I have a rendezvous with Death at some disputed barricade.
Alan Seeger
A punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well. Treason has done his worst. Nor steel nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing can touch him further.
William Shakespeare
All that live must die, passing through nature to eternity.
William Shakespeare
I always take my hat off to the death of others, but I will leave when I see my own. Oh, I forgot, I have never worn a hat, but on the other hand I have always tried to disturb.
Carl William Brown
But I will be a bridegroom in my death, and run into a lover’s bed.
William Shakespeare
I care not, a man can die but once; we owe God and death.
William Shakespeare
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
William Shakespeare
Men must endure, their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.
William Shakespeare
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven.
William Shakespeare
The undiscovered country form whose born no traveler returns.
William Shakespeare
By preaching in a calm, kind and serene way we do nothing but increase our aggressive and destructive impulse, perhaps by using a more sadistic and cruel language we will be able to calm our death instinct and favor the vital impulse of love.
Carl William Brown
The weariest and most loathed worldly life, that age, ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise, to what we fear of death.
William Shakespeare
Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing — a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.
George Bernard Shaw
I want to be all used up when I die.
George Bernard Shaw
Death is the veil which those who live call life. They sleep, and it is lifted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world’s slow stain, he is secure.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I am not afraid of death, in fact I will tell you that, after having seen so much stupidity, it almost makes me feel tender.
Carl William Brown
How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.
Dean Smith
Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
Socrates
The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.
Socrates
The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.
Socrates
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
Susan Sontag
I am ready to meet God face to face tonight and look into those eyes of infinite holiness, for all my sins are covered by the atoning blood.
R. A. Torrey
We all end up in a single bed sooner or later.
Author Unknown
We come and cry and that is life, we cry and go and that is death.
Author Unknown
We fear not death. That gloomy night, that pale-faced moon, and the affrighted stars that hurried through the sky, can witness that we fear not death.
Author Unknown
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In my end is my beginning.
Mary Stuart
Of course, death is not a very funny show, but when I think about life, I can’t help but admit that it is not so sad either.
Carl William Brown
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
Jonathan Swift
The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.
Publilius Syrus
Authority forgets a dying king.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
God’s finger touched him and he slept.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.
William M. Thackeray
And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
The Holy Bible Source: Matthew 10:28
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.
The Holy Bible
As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.
The Holy Bible Source: Job 14:11-12
He who is not afraid of death has learned to despise life, and he who despises life cannot help but desperately love freedom.
Carl William Brown
Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.
The Holy Bible Source: Psalms 39:4
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
The Holy Bible Source: 1 Corinthians 15:55
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His godly ones.
The Holy Bible Source: Psalms 116:15
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.
The Holy Bible Source: 1 Corinthians 15:26
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
The Holy Bible Source: Psalms 23:4
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
Paul Theroux
Do not go gentle into the good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day.
Dylan Thomas
Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.
Dylan Thomas
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
Henry David Thoreau
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
James Thurber
But the peasants – how do the peasants die?
Count Leo Tolstoy
Death is the only sure means of escape from an absurd world, in fact all other methods do not allow appreciable results. It is also true, however, that every escape from social problems is nothing but a false protest.
Carl William Brown
Death is not a period but a comma in the story of life.
Amos Traver
Having seen and felt the end, you have willed the means to the realization of the end.
Thomas Troward
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
Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain
We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.
Mark Twain
We are born alone and we die alone, but in the middle, unfortunately, we are very often in bad company.
Carl William Brown
We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.
Mark Twain
Why is it that we rejoice at birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
Mark Twain
A good man dies when a boy goes wrong.
Author Unknown
A good man dies when a boy goes wrong.
Author Unknown
God’s retirement plan is out of this world
Author Unknown
In the Middle Ages one of the prevailing themes was certainly that of the macabre dance of death; today it has transformed into that of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.
Author Unknown
It was once said that if you took all of the people who fell asleep in church and laid them end to end they would be more comfortable.
Author Unknown
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
Henry Van Dyke
Those to whom we say farewell, are welcomed by others.
Author Unknown
To fear death is to misunderstand life.
Author Unknown
When death overtakes us; all that we have is left to others; all that we are we take with us.
Author Unknown
When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Grandfather did — in his sleep. Not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car.
Author Unknown
Who is mightier than death? Those who can smile when death threatens.
Author Unknown
The tragic parable of life: we are born alone, we die alone, but in the middle unfortunately we have to meet a great quantity of assholes!
Carl William Brown
What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death.
Katha Upanishad
A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.
Percival Arland Ussher
Dear me! I must be turning into a god.
Vespasian
Death twitches my ear. “Live,” he says, “I am coming.”
Virgil
I have lived, and I have run the course which fortune allotted me; and now my shade shall descend illustrious to the grave.
Virgil
To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details.
Andy Warhol
God buries His workmen but carries on His work.
Charles Wesley
Take care of your of your life and the Lord will take of your death.
George Whitefield
Every love reveals to us our will to live and to create, but since ours is a destiny of death, even the noble feeling is nothing but a stupid illusion.
Carl William Brown
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Walt Whitman
To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Walt Whitman
For he who lives more lives than one: More deaths than one must die.
Oscar Wilde
One can survive everything nowadays, except death.
Oscar Wilde
Death is nature’s way of saying, “Your table’s ready.”
Robin Williams
Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.
Thomas Wolfe
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
Virginia Woolf
No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees; rolled around in earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.
William Wordsworth
I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.
William Butler Yeats
The true mystic is he who knows how to live even though he is dead. It is the famous theme of death in life and life in death.
Carl William Brown
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
All men think that all men are mortal but themselves.
Edward Young
Virtue alone has majesty in death.
Edward Young
No evil is honorable: but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.
Citium Zeno
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Thoughts and reflections on death
