Death Quotes

In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest - without asking to be paid.

Chinua Achebe

Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.

Joseph Addison

Death is better, a milder mover; for what thing without Zeus is done among mortals?

Aeschylus

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

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

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 answer the heroic question "Death, where is they sting?" with "It is here in my heart and mind and memories."

Maya Angelou

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

Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.

Robert Bolt

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.

Julie Burchill

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

Willa Cather

Unable are the Loved to die for Love is Immortality.

Emily Dickinson

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What greater pain could mortals have than this: To see their children dead before their eyes?

Euripedes

We who are left how shall we look again happily on the sun or feel the rain without remembering how they who went ungrudgingly and spent their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

Wilfred Wilson Gibson

Our brains are seventy - year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Come, for the House of Hope is built on sand: bring wine, for the fabric of life is as weak as the wind.

Hafiz

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

Thomas Mann

Neither fear your death’s day nor long for it.

Marcus Valerius Martialis ‘Martial’

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

Iris Murdoch

On a day of burial there is no perspective - for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was - to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.

Antoine de Saint - Exupery

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

Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple...Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.

George Bernard Shaw

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

George Bernard Shaw

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential - there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost...It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

Mark Twain

Science says: "We must live," and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: "We must die," and seeks how to make us die well.

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo

Our life is made by the death of others.

Leonardo da Vinci

They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead, that all of thee we loved and cherished has with thy summer roses perished; And left, as its young beauty fled, an ashen memory in its stead.

John Greenleaf Whittier