Death Quotes

Death Quotes offers quotes about the one thing we all will experience regardless of gender, race or creed: death. There is a story told about Lord Buddha: a woman’s baby had died and she cried at  Lord Buddha’s feet, begging him to do something. With pity, he told her, “You must go and fetch one mustard seed and bring it to me. But, the mustard seed must come from a household who has never experienced death.” The grieving woman began her search, and after some time came to realize – and accept – that death was part of life and that all humanity shares that grief. This knowledge led her to love her fellow man more deeply.


And behold this day I am going the way of all the earth.
- Old Testament: Joshua

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die.
- Mohandas K. Gandhi

It is uncertain where death may await thee, therefore expect it everywhere.
- Seneca

No life that breathes with human breath has ever truly longed for death.
- Tennyson

No young man believes he will ever die.- William Hazlitt

Nobody knows what death is, nor whether to man it is perchance the greatest of blessings, yet people fear it as if they surely knew it to be the worse of evils.
- Socrates

Not death is dreadful, but a shameful death.~ Menander

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.  That signifies nothing.  For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.  ~Albert Einstein

The fear of death follows from the fear of life.  A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. ~Mark Twain

All say, “How hard it is that we have to die” – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.  ~Mark Twain

I’m not afraid of death.  It’s the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life. ~Jean Giraudoux

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.  ~Samuel Butler

Gaily I lived as ease and nature taught,
And spent my little life without a thought,
And am amazed that Death, that tyrant grim,
Should think of me, who never thought of him.
~René Francois Regnier

We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears.  We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.  ~David Sarnoff

Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. ~Francis Bacon

If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn’t going to be much fun.  ~From the television show Roseanne

Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live. ~Henry Van Dyke

He who doesn’t fear death dies only once.  ~Giovanni Falcone

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.  It is as though they were traveling abroad. ~Marcel Proust

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.  ~Percival Arland Ussher

The idea is to die young as late as possible. ~Ashley Montagu

‘Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.  ~Lord Byron

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow. ~Euripides

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.  ~Leonardo Da Vinci

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. ~Alice Walker

I shall not die of a cold.  I shall die of having lived.  ~Willa Cather

Death is a distant rumor to the young. ~Andrew A. Rooney

There are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death.  ~Kenneth Patchen

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery.  He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does.  In place of this we have death.
~Charles Sanders Peirce

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.  ~Seneca

Years, following years, steal something every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.~Horace

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation.  For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.  ~Albert Einstein

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. ~Socrates

Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.  ~Attributed to George Carlin

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go. ~Jean de La Fontaine

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.  ~Erik H. Erikson

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. ~Susan Ertz

Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.  ~Herodotus

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future.  It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. ~Marcel Proust

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.  ~Tennessee Williams, “The Rose Tattoo”

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. ~Madame de Stael

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.  ~Edvard Munch

There’s nothing certain in a man’s life except this:  That he must lose it. ~Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Death is not the greatest loss in life.  The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.  ~Norman Cousins

Death is a debt we all must pay. ~Euripides

People living deeply have no fear of death.  ~Anaiïs Nin

Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in. ~George Bernard Shaw

I knew a man who once said, “death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back.”  ~From the movie Gladiator

Our birth is nothing but our death begun. ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

I want a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant clergyman.  I want to hedge my bets.  ~Wilson Mizner

No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well. ~Plato

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?  ~Kahlil Gibran

Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor. ~Homer, Iliad

Death is the surest calculation that can be made. ~Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter

You will never find that life for which you are looking.  When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.  ~The Epic of Gilgamesh

My soul is full of whispered song;
My blindness is my sight;
The shadows that I feared so long
Are all alive with light.
~Alice Cary, Dying Hymn

The goal of all life is death.  ~Sigmund Freud

Death is a release from the impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and the hard service of the flesh. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Oh, for the time when I shall sleep without identity.
~Emily Bronte

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
~Charles de Gaulle

And they die an equal death – the idler and the man of mighty deeds.  ~Homer, Iliad

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident – It is as common as life. ~Henry David Thoreau

Someday I’ll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night’s dream.
~Ryokan

To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. ~C.G. Jung

Death is patiently making my mask as I sleep.  Each morning I awake to discover in the corners of my eyes the small tears of his wax.  ~Philip Dow

For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. ~William Penn

Paradise -
I see flowers
from the cottage where I lie.
~Yaitsu’s death poem, 1807

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death. ~Leonardo da Vinci

On a large enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

God made death so we’d know when to stop.  ~Steven Stiles

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.  ~Stewart Alsop

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death. ~Thomas Browne, An Essay on Death

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you’ll grow out of it.  ~Doris Day

I intend to live forever.  So far, so good.  ~Steven Wright

I wouldn’t mind dying – it’s the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me.  ~R. Geis

You can be a king or a street sweeper,
but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.
~Robert Alton Harris

Death is life’s way of telling you you’re fired.  ~Author Unknown

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
~John Muir

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.  ~From a headstone in Ireland

In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing. ~Robert Ingersoll

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.  ~Kahlil Gibran

He spake well who said that graves are the footprints of angels. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die. ~Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground”

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
~Kenji Miyazawa

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Life is eternal, and love is immortal,
and death is only a horizon;
and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
~Rossiter Worthington Raymond

Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains.  ~Kahlil Gibran

When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure. ~Author Unknown

For some moments in life there are no words.
~David Seltzer, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Unable are the loved to die.  For love is immortality.  ~Emily Dickinson

We enjoy warmth because we have been cold. We appreciate light because we have been in darkness. By the same token, we can experience joy because we have known sadness.

When he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he will make the face of heav’n so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
~William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Although it’s difficult today to see beyond the sorrow,
May looking back in memory help comfort you tomorrow.
~Author Unknown

A beautiful death is for people who have lived like animals to die like angels.- Mother Teresa

A good death does honour to a whole life.- Petrarch

A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.
- Martin Luther King

All say, “How hard it is that we have to die”-a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.- Mark Twain

All victory ends in the defeat of death. That’s sure. But does defeat end the victory of death? That’s what I wonder.- Eugene O’Neill
And behold this day I am going the way of all the earth.
- Old Testament: Joshua
An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.- Freya Stark

It’s astonishing how important a man becomes whe he dies.
- Yiddish Saying

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.- Vladimir Nabokov