"Our respect for the dead, when they are just dead, is something wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful still. We show it with black feathers and black horses; we show it with black dresses and black heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow, which spoil half of our beautiful cathedrals. We show it with frightful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the quiet grass; and last, and not least, we show it by permitting ourselves to tell any number of falsehoods we think amiable or credible in the epitaph."
Death quotes
Death
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Death quotes (page 49 of 151)
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"How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world improve a sense of its natural beauties upon us. Like poor Falstaff, although I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have know from my infancy - their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with superhuman fancy."
"Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly."
"Death submits to no one."
"It cost about 75 cents to kill a man in Ceasar's time. The price rose to about $3,000 per man during the Napoleonic wars; to $5,000 in the American Civil War; and then to $21,000 per man in World War I. Estimates for the future wars indicate that it may cost the warring countries not less than $50,000 for each man killed."
"At the last, when we die, we have the dear angels for our escort on the way. They who can grasp the whole world in their hands can surely also guard our souls, that they make that last journey safely."
"Though in midst of life we be Snares of death surround us."
"To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death."
"One should always have one's boots on and be ready to leave."
"If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live."
"Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations."
"I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden."
"Well, now there's a remedy for everything except death."
"We die only once, and for such a long time."
"They never fail who die in a great cause."
"Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars."
"Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens."
"There is no way to escape death, it is just like trying to escape by four great mountains touching sky. There is no escape from these four mountains of birth, old age, sickness and death."
"Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die."
"I have good hope that there is something after death."