Death quotes
3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside death — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"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."
"What shall he fear that does not fear death."
"One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa-blessing it rather than in love with it."
"It has been reported that I was seriously ill--it was another man; dying--it was another man; dead--the other man again...As far as I can see, nothing remains to be reported, except that I have become a foreigner. When you hear it, don't you believe it. And don't take the trouble to deny it. Merely just raise the American flag on our house in Hartford and let it talk."
"He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed."
"And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?"
"Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive."
"There will come a time, when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything."
"I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed."
"O pity the dead that are dead, but cannot make the journey, still they moan and beat against the silvery adamant walls of life's exclusive city."
"It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery."
"A good death does honour to a whole life."
"The name of a successor is like the tolling of my own death-bell!"
"Death is never sweet, not even if it is suffered for the highest ideal."
"Pain lays not its touch upon a corpse."
"If I lived a billion years more, in my body or yours, there's not a single experience on Earth that could ever be as good as being dead. Nothing."
"I have only one curiosity left: death."
"... to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o'clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you."
"... the way we view death determines, to a surprising degree, the way we live our lives."
"Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death."
