quotations about death
Fear ye not
The wrath of any man, nor hide your word
Within your breast: the day of death and doom
Awaits alike the freeman and the slave.
AESCHYLUS
The Libation Bearers
Death is the Christian's vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist the only difference between a living and a dead body is, that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must be death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as death where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
Isis Unveiled
Death is when the monsters get you.
STEPHEN KING
Salem's Lot
Those who think about death, carrying with them their existing ideas and emotions, usually assume that they will have, during their last hours, ideas and emotions of like vividness ... but they do not fully recognize the implication that the feeling faculty, too, is almost gone. The imagine the state to be one in which they can have emotions such as they now have on contemplating the cessation of life. But at the last all the mental powers simultaneously ebb, as do the bodily powers, and with them goes the capacity for emotion in general. It is, indeed, possible that in its last stages consciousness is occupied by a not displeasurable sense of rest.
HERBERT SPENCER
Facts and Comments
The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
The dead body makes the living one obscene. It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of things.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Sirens of Titan
Death is not an end, but a transition-crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Death makes equal the high and low.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Be Merry Friends
Of all the Gods, Death only craves not gifts:
Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured
Avails; no altars hath he, nor is soothed
By hymns of praise. From him alone of all
The powers of Heaven Persuasion holds aloof.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Philosophical Essays
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
HORACE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
Death, with funereal shades in vain surrounds me,
My reason through his darkness seeth light:
'Tis the last step which brings me close to Thee:
'Tis the veil falling, 'twixt Thy face and mine.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Prayer", Poetical Meditations
Death is only a small interruption.
ANITA BROOKNER
Latecomers
Fair Death, kind Death, it was a gracious deed
To take that weary vagrant to thy breast.
Love, Song and Wine had he, and but one need--Rest.
JOYCE KILMER
"A Dead Poet"
The gate of death is never at rest.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Taunting Death ... means pitting oneself against a wily enemy who cannot lose.
J. K. ROWLING
The Tales of Beedle the Bard