A person has learned much who has learned how to die.
German (on death and dying)
Death keeps no calendar.
English (on death and dying)
Death never takes a wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go.
Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695)
Death pays all debts.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Death takes no bribes.
Ben Franklin (1706-1790)
Six feet of earth makes us all equal.
Italian (on death and dying)
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Steve Jobs
Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.
Napoleon Bonaparte
I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.
Corazon Aquino
The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.
Albert Einstein
I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
Marcus Aurelius
To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
J.K. Rowling
Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.
Langston Hughes
When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time.
Laurie Halse Anderson
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
Mahatma Gandhi
I’m not afraid of death. It’s the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
Jean Giraudoux
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Samuel Butler
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Mark Twain
A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.
Percival Arland Ussher
Death is a distant rumor to the young.
Andrew A. Rooney
Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
Rossiter Worthington Raymond
To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?
Socrates
Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.
Martin Luther
Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.
Seneca
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
George Eliot
Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.
Proverb
Thank Heaven! the crisis
The danger, is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last
, and the fever called ”Living” is conquered at last.
Edgar Allan Poe
Death – the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening.
Walter Scott
The first breath is the beginning of death.
Thomas Fuller
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
The boundaries between life and death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and where the other begins?
Edgar Allen Poe
Death is the veil which those who live call life: They sleep, and it is lifted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Dying is like getting audited by the IRS
something that only happens to other people … until it happens to you.
Jerome P. Crabb
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
Sir Thomas Browne
The world’s an inn, and death the journey’s end.
John Dryden
Dying is like coming to the end of a long novel
you only regret it if the ride was enjoyable and left you wanting more.
Jerome P. Crabb
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
John Ashbery
For death is but a passing phase of Life; A change of dress, a disrobing; A birth into the unborn again; A commencing where we ended; A starting where we stopped to rest; A crossroad of Eternity; A giving up of something, to possess all things. The end of the unreal, the beginning of the real.
Edwin Leibfreed
Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.
Andrew Sachs
Death is a law, not a punishment.
Jean Dubos
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw
As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.
Sogyal Rinpoche
We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.
Antonin Artaud
For certain is death for the born, And certain is birth for the dead; Therefore over the inevitable, Thou shouldst not grieve.
Bhagavad Gita
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Epicurus
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
Isaac Asimov
I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather… Not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.
Will Shriner
