Death quotes
3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside death — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim - objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death."
"All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death."
"One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation."
"Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old. Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives. In all creation, be assured, there is no death - no death, but only change and innovation; what we men call birth is but a different new beginning; death is but to cease to be the same. Perhaps this may have moved to that, and that to this, yet still the sum of things remains the same."
"Man should ever look to his last day, and no one should be called happy before his funeral. [Lat., Ultima semper Expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus Ante obitum nemo et suprema funera debet.]"
"How beautiful it is for a man to die Upon the walls of Zion! to be called Like a watch-worn and weary sentinel, To put his armour off, and rest in heaven!"
"It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other."
"Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names."
"That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place."
"Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth."
"Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying."
"Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it."
"Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years."
"People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful."
"I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out."
"Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!"
"Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light."
"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."
"Death lays his icy hand on kings."
"Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street."
