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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"Death either destroys or unhusks us. If it means liberation, better things await us when our burden s gone: if destruction, nothing at all awaits us; blessings and curses are abolished."
"There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing."
"One must take all one's life to learn how to leave, and what will perhaps make you wonder more, one must take all one's life to learn how to die."
"The most happy ought to wish for death."
"Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all. It sets the slave at liberty, carries the banished man home, and places all mortals on the same level, insomuch that life itself were a punishment without it."
"Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives."
"We've discovered that the earth isn't flat; that we won't fall off its edges, and our experience as a species has changed as a result. Maybe we'll soon find out that the self isn't "flat" either, and that death is as real and yet as deceptive as the horizon; that we don't fall out of life either."
"The end of one thing is just the beginning of another."
"It's like those eerie stories nurses tell, Of how some actor on a stage played Death, With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart, And called himself the monarch of the world; Then, going in the tire-room afterward, Because the play was done, to shift himself, Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly, The moment he had shut the closet door, By Death himself. Thus God might touch a Pope At unawares, ask what his baubles mean, And whose part he presumed to play just now. Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true!"
"Shun death, is my advice."
"Even the bold will fly when they see Death drawing in close enough to end their life."
"For the dead there are no more toils."
"More men die of worry than of work, because more men worry than work."
"But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetities, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies."
"Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse."
"the scythers, Time and Death, Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath"
"When a man has died, he wants you to know about it."
"Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I."
"I’ll never speak to God again."
"Your Integrity is more important than your immediate Life."
