1,727 Death Quotes

The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, for ever. Pause, my soul, On these strange words - for ever - whose large sound Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise Our human moans make on the shores of Time. O Thou that openest, and no man shuts; That shut'st, and no man opens - Thee we wait!

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.

If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: 'Byron is dead!'

We now to peace and darkness And earth and thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more.

A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.

Let us love the passing hour, let us hurry up and enjoy our time.

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

Accordingly, death is a harbor of peace for the just, but is believed a shipwreck for the wicked.

Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide.

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.

I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.

Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.

Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.

The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.

Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

The task I've been given seems absurd: To wait here on earth until I no longer exist.

The entire universe will eventually disintegrate but by then I hope to be in a safer place.

Dying is a part of living, but only a very small part.

If I can survive death, I can probably survive anything.

I've learned to accept birth and death . . . but sometimes I still worry about what lies between.

Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.

I'm so old they've cancelled my blood type.

A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.

The great question is not, who died right, but who lived right? There is infinitely more responsibility in living than in dying. The moment of death is the most unimportant moment of life. Nothing can be done then. It is a moment when life ceases to be of value. While living, while you have health and strength, you can augment the happiness of your fellow-men; and the man who has made others happy need not be afraid to die.

Where is the soul? . . . I refuse to believe anything of that kind without proof. The idea that, as soon as a man's breath leaves his body, the soul flops out like a chicken's head and flies off into space to find a lodgment where there [are] harps and haloes. Too much for me.

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest - Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest - Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Them that die will be the lucky ones!

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home!

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket-- The sea was still breaking violently and night Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light Flashed from his matted head and marble feet, He grappled at the net With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs: The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites, Its open, staring eyes Were lustreless dead-lights Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk Heavy with sand.

He felle dede doun colde as ony stone.

And thy traveyle shalt thou sone ende, For to thy long home sone shalt thou wende.

And now her eyes grew bright, and brighter still, Too bright for ours to look upon, suffused With many tears, and closed without a cloud. They set as sets the morning star, which goes Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides Obscured among the tempests of the sky, But melts away into the light of heaven.

I don't believe in reincarnation. That's a cop-out... I anticipate death will be a totally unconscious void in which you float through eternity with no particular consciousness of anything.

You have been tried by twelve good men and true, not of your peers but as high above you as heaven is of hell, and they have said you are guilty. Time will pass and seasons will come and go. Spring with its wavin' green grass and heaps of sweet-smellin' flowers on every hill and in every dale. Then sultry Summer, with her shimmerin' heat-waves on the baked horizon. And Fall, with her yeller harvest moon and the hills growin' brown and golden under a sinkin' sun. And finally Winter, with its bitin', whinin' wind, and all the land will be mantled with snow. But you won't be here to see any of 'em; not by a damn sight, because it's the order of this court that you be took to the nearest tree and hanged by the neck til you're dead, dead, dead, you olive-colored son of a billy goat.

Thanks to the directors for addressing this message to my home. Written several minutes before my death.

I was suspicious for several reasons... after all, Hess who had been held in Spandau for almost 30 years was by then 93-years-old and fragile. I doubted he had the strength to kill himself with a cord which was not attached at both ends to anything.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, So-oldier of the Queen!

If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.

'Stand up, stand up now, Tomlinson, and answer loud and high 'The good that ye did for the sake of men or ever ye came to die - 'The good that ye did for the sake of men in little earth so lone!' And the naked soul of Tomlinson grew white as a rain-washed bone.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried, When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died, We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it - lie down for an aeon or two, Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew!

It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world, Which you can read and care for just so long, But presently you feel that you will die Unless you get the page you're readin' done, An' turn another - likely not so good; But what you're after is to turn 'em all.

I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.

This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead That sparkled so the day I saw it first, And darkened slowly after. I am she Who loves all beauty - yet I wither it.

Make songs for Death as you would sing to Love - But you will not assuage him. He alone Of all the gods will take no gifts from men.

When I am dead and over me bright April Shakes out her rain-drenched hair, Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted, I shall not care. I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful When rain bends down the bough, And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted Than you are now.

Oh Earth, you gave me all I have, I love you, I love you, - oh what have I That I can give you in return - Except my body after I die?

I am alone, as though I stood On the highest peak of the tired gray world, About me only swirling snow, Above me, endless space unfurled; With earth hidden and heaven hidden, And only my own spirit's pride To keep me from the peace of those Who are not lonely, having died.

So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.

Life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore, nor actual difficulty in our life.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, 'I will always be here.'

It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you.

Fear makes us blind, and we touch each fear with all the avid curiosity of self-interest, trying to make a whole out of a hundred parts, like the blind men with their elephant. We sense the shape. Children grasp it easily, forget it, and relearn it as adults. The shape is there, and most of us come to realize what it is sooner or later: it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear - an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We're afraid of the body under the sheet. It's our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths.

He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?

There are a great many ways to commit suicide you know.

'The reason all of this is so horrible,' McVries said, 'is because it's just trivial. You know? We've sold ourselves and traded our souls on trivialities. Olson, he was trivial. He was magnificent, too, but those things aren't mutually exclusive. He was magnificent and trivial. Either way, or both, he died like a bug under a microscope.'

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other...except through faith.

I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids...Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you're going to die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone.

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

I don't want Church to be like all those dead pets! I don't want Church to ever be dead! He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!

We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long. (closing line)

The boat that took my love away He sent again to me To tell me that he would not sleep Alone beneath the sea.

We really haven't got any great amount of data on the subject, and without data how can we reach any definite conclusions? All we have - everything - favors the idea of what religionists call the 'Hereafter.' Science, if it ever learns the facts, probably will find another more definitely descriptive term.

It is very beautiful over there!

I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.

We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemorality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

L'?il etait dans la tombe et regardait Cain.

What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here there, she survived. Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.

Winds and waters keep A hush more dead than any sleep.

Scarcely a tear to shed; Hardly a word to say; The end of a Summer's day; Sweet Love is dead.

But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead.

And before you know me gone Eternity and I are one.

I am deeply affected by the news of the untimely death of President McKinley. I hasten to express the deepest and most heartfelt sympathy of the German people to the great American nation. Germany mourns with American for her noble son, who lost his life while he was fulfilling his duty to his country and people.

All our people loved their dead President. His kindly nature and lovable traits of character, and his amiable consideration for all about him will long live in the minds and hearts of his countrymen. He loved them in return with such patriotism and unselfishness that in this hour of their grief and humiliation he would say to them: 'It is God's will; I am content. If there is a lesson in my life of death, let it be taught to those who still live, and leave the destiny of their country in their keeping.' Let us, then, as our dead is buried out of our sight, seek for the lessons and the admonitions that may be suggested by the life and death which constitutes our theme.

I must give you a piece of intelligence that you perhaps already know - namely, that the ungodly arch-villain Voltaire has died miserably like a dog - just like a brute. That is his reward!