quotations about death
I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
"Insurance Up to Date", Literary Lapses
Death, I am told, is as easy and as simple as going to sleep and then awakening. Our etheric body slips out of the physical body, carrying the mind with it, and we awake to our new surroundings to find our friends and relations ready to help and instruct us in our new life. Death is simply the severance of this etheric body or structure from the physical body. The physical body returns to earth, and the etheric body, controlled by the mind, continues to function in the etheric world which, though within and also without the physical, yet cannot be appreciated by us so long as we are inhabitants of the physical body. Our range of sight and touch is too confined for us to appreciate these finer vibrations.
J. ARTHUR FINDLAY
On the Edge of the Etheric
A man would die, though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft over and over.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
What greater gift is there than to demonstrate you need not fear death?
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
So they pass away: friends, kindred, the dearest-loved, grown people, aged, infants. As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written; unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Roundabout Papers
Death has an energy. It is thick as sludge, heavy as iron, and pulls you down into yourself like an imploding building.
VICTORIA LAURIE
Death Perception
Death is a creditor that is never ignored.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"The God in the Bowl"
Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Death is a flock of blackbirds low over muddy streets
in war-torn Sarajevo. Dirt-stained walls yearn
for all that is night. Elegies fall like raw silk.
If there is a way it is here.
Salt and ash.
CHRIS ABANI
Sanctificum
Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Stranger
Death is the end of every worldly pain.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
It seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with the cessation of consciousness at death, there ceases to be any knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though he had never lived. And then the consciousness itself -- what is it during the time that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements lapse into the Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were derived.
HERBERT SPENCER
Facts and Comments
Death envies those asleep in her ...
Extinguished softly in her womb.
EVELYN SCOTT
"For Wives and Mistresses"
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods
can defend a man, not even one they love, that day
when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.
HOMER
The Odyssey
For 3 days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but the phone calls taper off.
JOHNNY CARSON
The Tonight Show
Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
A death-blow is a life-blow to some
Who, till they died, did not alive become;
Who, had they lived, had died, but
when They died, vitality begun.
EMILY DICKINSON
"A Death blow is a Life blow to Some"