~Horace~
Years, following years, steal something every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.
~Herodotus~
Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.
~Homer, Iliad~
Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor.
~Homer, Iliad~
And they die an equal death – the idler and the man of mighty deeds.
~H.L. Mencken~
When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness…. No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever…. I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
~Henry David Thoreau, 11 March 1842, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson~
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident – It is as common as life.
~Harvey Cushing~
There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death.
~Isaac Asimov~
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
~James F. Bymes~
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death.
~Jacques Rigaut, Pensées~
God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality.
~Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu~
Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.
~J.J. Furnas~
Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees.
~Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon, 1929~
I’m not afraid of death. It’s the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
~Jean de La Fontaine~
Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go.
~John Muir~
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 Donne~
God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man’s grave is his Sabbath.
~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1945~
Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.
~Kenneth Patchen~
There are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death.
~Kahlil Gibran, from “The Prophet”~
For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
~Leonardo Da Vinci~
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
~Leonardo da Vinci~
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.
~Lord Byron~
‘Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.
~Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter~
Death is the surest calculation that can be made.
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