quotations about death
God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Death is the only sovereign whom no partiality can warp, and no price corrupt.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Death! the deep, sublime and unsubdued fiat!
The licensed liberator of imprisoned souls!
The conqueror of conquerors! th' inexorable,
Unfathomed and unfathomable fate! Arch foe,
And dread antagonist of life! Its armed and fierce
Invader, horror, and dismay! whose naked sword,
In trembling balance hung, is over all its joys,
And banquets of delight, ready to pierce the heart
That with fond ardour beats! Oh! who can turn its point?
Or its swift aim arrest?
C. B. LANGSTON
"Death"
In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
The day of death ... is one of the five mysteries, the key of which God holds in his own hands.
éDOUARD RENé DE LABOULAYE
Abdallah
There are some dead who are more alive than the living.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
Face your faith
Remove all the lace
You love me to death
But death my love you more
HOOVERPHONIC
"You Love Me to Death", No More Sweet Music
Death walks behind you.
ATOMIC ROOSTER
"Death Walks Behind You"
When among the graves of thy fellows, walk with circumspection; thine own is open at thy feet.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead,
And knells ring around us wherever we tread,
And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright
Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.
MARY T. LATHRAP
"Unfinished Lines"
Death submits to no one.
HOMER
The Iliad
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! -- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
JOHN KEATS
"When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be"
O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray,
To come to me; of cureless ills thou art
The one physician. Pain lays not its touch
Upon a corpse.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Into the chilly, artificial air, death slipped and snuck--the god of all thieves.
J. D. ROBB
Salvation in Death
Always be thou prepared, and so live that death may never find thee unprepared.
THOMAS A. KEMPIS
The Imitation of Christ
A dead man's shroud has no pockets.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Death is a process, not an event, despite medical and legal imperatives to give it a date and hour.
JAMES W. GREEN
Beyond the Good Death
Death is a child of stone.
EVELYN SCOTT
"Immortality"