Quotes: Death

The idea in bold-face print is a summary of the quote. The number after the topic is the page on which the quote was found.

Death
Death 617 His sole task was to record the names of the dead so that their names will not be forgotten at the Resurrection. "His sole task…the duty for which Providence had sent the old man into the world, as it were with a chisel in his hand...was to label the dead bodies, lest their names should be forgotten at the resurrection." Hawthorne: “Chippings with a Chisel”

Death 623 Belief that one's spirit at death will be extinguished forever. "…an infidel, whose grave stone, by his own direction, bore an avowal of his belief that the spirit within him would be extinguished like a flame, and that the nothingness whence he sprang would receive him again." Hawthorne: “Chippings with a Chisel”

Death 724 "When death is nigh, men converse with dreams and shadows." Hawthorne: “The Antique Ring”

Death 762 The symbol for a person about to die would be flight upward. "The idea of Death is in them, or not far off; but were they to choose a symbol for him, it would be the butterfly soaring upward, or the bright angel beckoning them aloft…." Hawthorne: “The New Adam and Eve”

Death 824 Death will one day drown in his own cold waters. " …the chill that will never leave those waters, until Death be drowned in his own river…." Hawthorne: “The Celestial Rail-Road”

Death 1019 Think of the bones of the dead who once made a great deal of noise while they were alive. "…think much about graves, with the long grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who made noise enough in their day…." Hawthorne: “P’s Correspondence”

Death 85 No one who retires or dies creates any chasm in the progress of the world. "It was perhaps ordained by Providence….that no individual should be of such importance, as to cause, by his retirement or death, any chasm in the world." Sam. Johnson. 1750-2. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 85 "Soon you will have forgotten the world, and the world will have forgotten you." Marcus Aurelius. 2nd century. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 229 "All the arts and sciences have their roots in the struggle against death." St. Gregory of Nyssa. 4th century. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 347 Every parting is a death. "In every parting there is an image of death." George Eliot. 1858. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 355 Our life is our last cruise. "Old and young, we are all on our last cruise." Robert Louis Stevenson. 1881. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 355 If some died and some didn't, death would be an affliction. "If some persons died, and others did not die, death would indeed be a terrible affliction." La Bruyere. 1688. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 355 We get into the habit of living and therefore are never ready for dying. "The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying." Sir Thomas Browne. 1858. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 355 By the time I am ready to die, I have grown used to death and dying. "I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and I have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness." Santayana. 1931. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 356 We are less ready to die if we know we have lived in vain. "Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain." Hazlitt. 1815. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 357 We progress through sickness and death toward final equality. "It may be said that disease generally begins that equality which death completes." Sam. Johnson. 1750-2. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.


Death 358 When it comes to death, we are all apprentices because we only do it once. "A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, and suchlike accidents; but as to death, we can experience it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it." Montaigne. 1580-8. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 358 "It’s not that I’m afraid to die; I just don’t want to be there when it happens." Woody Allen. 1971. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 358 Death affects only the survivors. "A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own." Thomas Mann. 1924. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 359 We put on long faces at the funeral, but we are gay at the luncheon afterward because he died, not we. "At the funerals of our relations we do our best to put on long faces, but at the luncheon afterwards our hilarity breaks out; for it is he who has died and not ourselves." Gerald Brenan. 1978. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 359 Just don't let me be buried alive. "All I desire for my own burial is not to be buried alive." Lord Chesterfield. 1769. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 360 Every dying person had unique characteristics that are lost forever. "The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost." Schopenhauer. 1851. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Death 254 "Death levels all things." Claudian. Latin. Dictionary of Foreign Terms

Death 321 We never know when we are going to die. "Death keeps no calendar." Russian. Dictionary of Foreign Terms

Death 13 The old accept death calmly as a part of nature. "The next door of death sads him not, but he [the good old man] expects it calmly as his turn in nature...." John Earle, “A Good Old Man.” 1628. Gross, ed. Essays.

Death 41 We have only two things in common: we were born and we died and that is all that is remembered. "Most of them [tombstones] recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances, that are common to mankind...a kind of satire upon the departed persons; who had left no other memorial of them, but that they were born and that they died." Joseph Addison, “Thoughts in Westminster Abbey.” 1711. Gross, ed. Essays.

Death 41 After death, our remains have no distinguishing characteristics. "...I began to consider with myself what innumerable multitudes of people lay confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass; how beauty, strength, and youth, with old age, weakness and deformity, lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of matter." Joseph Addison, “Thoughts in Westminster Abbey.” 1711. Gross, ed. Essays.

Death 43 "When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the griefs of parents upon a tombstone my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions and debates of mankind." Joseph Addison, “Thoughts in Westminster Abbey.” 1711. Gross, ed. Essays.

Death 311 The only pleasure about other people dying is that we have outlived them. "They [the old] hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple child-like pleasure at having outlived someone else...." Robert Louis Stevenson, “Aes Triplex.” 1878. Gross, ed. Essays.

Death 111 Most people accept death and are not angry about its inevitability. "You never really knew a man, he [Fuchs] said, until you saw him die; most men were game and went without a grudge." Cather, My Ántonia

Death 311 "One night he was gone—just as if you had blown out a candle." Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth.

Death 245 "She intended to meet her own end with senses intact, grasp it, know it finally, open herself to the mystery that others mistake for something freakish and unspeakable." DeLillo, Underworld.

Death 69 We know we are going to die, but when is a matter of circumstance. "That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance…." Heller, Catch-22.

Death 167 It's what death does to the body that is repugnant. "…the smells and the cruel shapes into which physical death could force a body." Mailer, The Naked and the Dead.

Death 264 Do we know or care why we die? "They’d die without knowing why…." Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Death 267 He saw a man shot to death, executed, as a child and all his life he never forgot it. "…that distant dawn when Colonel Gerinoldo Marquez took him to the barracks, not so that he could see an execution, but so that for the rest of his life he would never forget the sad and somewhat mocking smile of the man being shot…not only his oldest memory, but the only one he had of his childhood." Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Death 113 People do not mourn those who die anticipating what is next. "Utopia. …whoever departs this life eagerly, full of good hope, is mourned by no one." Sir Thomas More, Utopia.