quotations about death
It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too--as if it were comparatively a light thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother who has to climb the whole toilsome steep with us, and all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey.
GEORGE ELIOT
Janet's Repentance
We are the fools of Time and Terror: Days
Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
LORD BYRON
Manfred
What is
Death, so it be but glorious? 'Tis a sunset;
And mortals may be happy to resemble
The Gods but in decay.
LORD BYRON
Sardanapalus
I don't know what's waiting for us when we die--something better, something worse. I only know I'm not ready to find out yet.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
Of all the Gods, Death only craves not gifts:
Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured
Avails; no altars hath he, nor is soothed
By hymns of praise. From him alone of all
The powers of Heaven Persuasion holds aloof.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free--men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Dialogue with Death
A man's life breath cannot come back again--
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.
HOMER
The Iliad
Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
CHARLES FROHMAN
his last words before going down on the Lusitania
By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
The Book of Hours
There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Reaper and the Flowers"
When we pray for death we really desire a fuller life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
I ... shall die, I do suppose, with a full consciousness of my being and with a great fear in my eyes. And though many die decrepit and senile, that is not the normal death of men, for men have in them something of a self-creative power, which pushes them on to the further realization of themselves, right up to the edge of their doom.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Nothing & Kindred Subjects
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
He steps upon death that stirs a foot.
THOMAS DEKKER
Blurt
Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
East Side Story
The fear of death has been raised too much and set up on high, especially by preachers, like the brazen serpent in the wilderness over the heads of the Israelites; but not with so good excuse as that symbol had, for this fear has not been curative, I think, nor made into pleasant or graceful shape, but rather a horrid spectacle, to affright people. For that men can be frightened into piety has been one of the legacies of religion which barbarous ages have bequeathed us plentifully.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House
Death is just--to the just.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims