Death Quotes

The faithful clamoured to be buried alongside the martyrs, as close as possible to the venerable remains, a custom which, in anthropological terms, recalls Neolithic beliefs that certain human remains possessed supernatural properties. It was believed that canonized saints did not rot, like lesser mortals, but that their corpses were miraculously preserved and emanated an odour of sanctity, a sweet, floral smell, for years after death. In forensic terms, such preservation is likely to be a result of natural mummification in hot, dry conditions.

~ Catharine Arnold

Meanwhile, we have carved out a place for ourselves among the dead; the glittering pinnacles of commerce rise along the skyline, their foundations sunk in a charnel house; and the lost lie forgotten below us as, overhead, we persaude ourselves that we are immortal and carry on the business of life.

~ Catharine Arnold

[W]hen the pleasure is at the sweetest, death is the nearest (461)[.]

~ Richard Baxter

The sweetest poison doth often bring the surest death (645).

~ Richard Baxter

Blood diamonds, she thought. That’s exactly what these are. She felt almost as superstitious as the Africans now, as if the pink diamonds themselves had somehow caused all this hardship and death.

~ Mike Wells

When we are rich and famous and powerful, we do not want to die. On the other hand, if we are miserable and suffering, we want to die and leave it all. But can joy or misery last forever? There is a saying, All celebrations must end sometime. Any wish to live forever or die immediately is often a whim of the moment. How do we know that, although we are happy now, we may not be sad the next day, or sad now but may be happy soon? Given that good and ill, fortune and misfortune come in their own way, we should not cling to life or embrace death. Life and death will come of their own. Why be greedy about life and afraid of death?

~ Liezi

Lifelong pain, an unwanted pregnancy, and even death may be the reward for such a brief window of pleasure. What a foolish gamble!

~ James C. Dobson

If my belief in the God-force-principle-thing had faltered from time to time, it was completely reaffirmed that morning when I considered how completely brilliant a creation was fermentation. From decay came a pleasure sublime enough to keep decay at bay. Only for a few minutes, perhaps, but some minutes are like no others.

~ Tony Hendra

Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, and how richly we should have enjoyed the life of pleasure, the travels in unknown lands, which are about to be snatched from us! And no sooner is the danger past than we resume once more the same dull life in which none of those delights existed for us.

~ Marcel Proust

She prayed to the gods of love and the gods of destruction, for they are one and the same.

~ Lawren Leo

Harmony would only come with destruction.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

A house can be replaced but never a lost life.

~ Sarah Salem

If this is the will of God, it takes a strange and terrible shape. I did not know that the God of Battles was vile like this. I never knew that a saint could summon torment like this.

~ Philippa Gregory

Lady Moon rose an' gazed o'er my busted'n'beautsome Valleys with silv'ry'n'sorryin' eyes, an' the dingos mourned for the died uns.

~ David Mitchell

Rejoice, for bad things are about to happen.

~ Ryan Sohmer

Welcome to vampire-ville.” He chuckled.

~ S.l. Ross

I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavors. Where might I be, if I were not here? Who, what, how could I be, if I were not me, if this outward appearance that is me did not encase me, separating my consciousness from that of others who are not me? An organism—a blind, rash, pitiful eruption of the insistent assertion of the will. Far better, really, if that will were to drift free in a night without time or space, than to languish in a prison cell lit only by the flickering, uncertain flame of the intellect.

~ Thomas Mann

A will can save one’s family from being put into a quagmired pit of legal conundrum, in case of death (which may even be untimely).

~ Henrietta Newton Martin

If your are an expatriate, a 'will' is required because, the laws of the country in which you reside would be different from that of your home country, and when the inevitable (death) occurs (untimely), your property /possessions may be exposed to the discretion of the state laws for the allocation of your property to someone, you may have never wished that they possess your property and be an heir to your assets.

~ Henrietta Newton Martin

For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

~ Albert Camus

Fate is the cruelest of masters, takingLife when it pleases or at random, handingRigged decks to whom it pleases, cheatingAll alike and none the wiser, takingEverything away from those with nothing.

~ Justin Wetch

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

~ George Santayana

Leave nothing for death but a burned-out castle

~ Nikos Kazantzakis

(About Sartre...)His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

I tell the squad a joke: Stop me if you're heard this. There was a Marine of nuts and bolts, half robot--weird but true--whose every move was cut from pain as though from stone. His stoney little hide had been crushed and broken. But he just laughed and said, 'I've been crushed and broken before.' And sure enough, he had the heart of a bear. His heart functioned for weeks after it had been diagnosed by doctors. His heart weighed half a pound. His heart pumped seven hundred thousand gallons of warm blood through one hundred thousand miles of veins, working hard--hard enough in twelve hours to lift one sixty-five ton boxcar one foot off the deck. He said. The world would not waste the heart of a bear, he said. On his clean blue pajamas many medals hung. He was a walking word of history, in the shop for a few repairs. He took it on the chin and was good. One night in Japan his life came out of his body--black--like a question mark. If you can keep your head while others are losing theirs perhaps you have misjudged the situation. Stop me if you've heard this...

~ Gustav Hasford

In your dream you call for Chaplain Charlie. You met the Navy chaplain when you interviewed him for a feature article you were writing. Chaplain Charlie was an amateur magician. With his magic, Chaplain Charlie entertained Marines in sick bays and distributed spiritual tourniquets to men who were still alive, but weaponless. To brutal, godless children Chaplain Charlie spoke about how God is merciful, despite appearances, about how the Ten Commandments lack detail because when you're writing on stone tablets with lightning bolts you've got to be brief, about how the Free World will conquer Communism with aid of God and a few Marines, and about free fish. One day a Vietnamese child booby-trapped Chaplain Charlie's black bag of tricks. Chaplain Charlie reached in and pulled out a bright ball of death...

~ Gustav Hasford

What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding?

~ Anton Chekhov

I was dead for a billion of years and in a few years I will be dead again. I'm not conscious of that state of lifelessness which was before I came to life. And I'm not sure about the lifelessness that is yet to come. Life is only a station between these two states. It is a chance to experience and to do something, the only chance known with certainty. The major issue is to find what is worth living for, but an even greater issue is to find what is worth dying for. We all die anyway.

~ Huseyn Raza

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

~ Roberto Mangabeira Unger

So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament—the presentiment of death and awareness of life—and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to a end.

~ Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Old people die not because no one cared for them but because someone they expected care from did not bother.

~ Vipin Behari Goyal

The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth which are lit in turn by the sun, the passing of life--all these filled me once more with a feeling of oppression. Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes' cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.A mind hearing this pitiless warning--a warning which, at the same time, is so compassionate--would decide to conquer its weakness and meanness, its laziness and vain hopes and cling with all its power to every second which flies away forever.Great examples come to your mind and you see clearly that you are a lost soul, your life is being frittered away on petty pleasures and pains and trifling talk. Shame! Shame! you cry, and bite your lips.

~ Nikos Kazantzakis

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening

~ Zhuangzi

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

~ Tom Perrotta

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

~ Tom Stoppard

I always thought I wasn't afraid to die. No... No one is afraid of death itself. Your pain and suffering is over in an instant. What really makes me suffer... Is seeing you crying over me... From the darkness of the Milky Way.I'm sorry... Please don't make that face. You look best when you're smiling, you know.

~ Inio Asano

The Age of the Stars had come to an end. Once in a billion years, a feeble supernova illuminated the vestiges of its home; brown dwarfs, neutron stars, blackholes... lifeless echoes of their former majesty.

~ Jake Vander-Ark

Nothing ceases to exist. Energy does not perish, it merely changes forms. The ones you love, the ones you lose, they still exist as long as the cosmos does.

~ Amie Kaufman

Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.

~ Terry Pratchett

And instead of dying Immediately after they shot him, he would go on to survive several days solely because of the cold that January. Maybe that's why we are drawn to those who posses the coldest of hearts ... In effort to survive. 

~ Bethany Brookbank