Death Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Death's stamp gives value to the coin of life; making it possible to buy with life what is truly precious.

Rabindranath Tagore

A lethargy of sleep,
Most like to death, so calm, so deep.

Virtue is the death of conscience because it is the habit of Good, and yet the ethic of the honest man infinitely prefers virtue to the noblest agonies of conscience. Thus, being poses nonbeing and eliminates it. There is only being

Jean-Paul Sartre

Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?

I met a Californian who would
Talk California—a state so blessed,
He said, in climate, none had ever died there
A natural death.

But I am the real Strider, fortunately. I am Aragorn son of Arathorn; and if by life or death I can save you, I will.

J. R. R. Tolkien

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but caring little for it, and even less about the imperfections of my garden.

Michel de Montaigne

Agathon: But all that talk about death being the same as sleep.
Socrates: Yes, the difference is that when you're dead and somebody yells, "Everybody up, it's morning," it's very hard to find your slippers.

Death is neither a good nor a bad thing, for that alone which is something can be a good or a bad thing: but that which is nothing, and reduces all things to nothing, does not hand us over to either fortune, because good and bad require some material to work upon. Fortune cannot take ahold of that which Nature has let go, nor can a man be unhappy if he is nothing.

Seneca the Younger

You want to have proven to you that the soul is imperishable and immortal, and you think that the philosopher who is confident in death has but a vain and foolish confidence, if he thinks that he will fare better than one who has led another sort of life, in the world below, unless he can prove this; and you say that the strength and divinity of the soul, and of her existence prior to our becoming men, does not necessarily imply her immortality.... For any man, who is not devoid of natural feeling, has reason to fear, if he has no knowledge or proof of the soul's immortality. That is what I suppose you to say, Cebes, which I designedly repeat, in order that nothing may escape us...

If you fight with all your might, there is a chance of life; where as death is certain if you cling to your corner

This fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest.

William Shakespeare

If it be aught toward the general good, Set honor in one eye and death i' th' other, And I will look on both indifferently; For let the gods so speed me as I love The name of honor more than I fear death.

William Shakespeare

This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.

Thy soul shall find itself alone 'Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone— Not one, of all the crowd, to pry Into thine hour of secrecy. Be silent in that solitude, Which is not loneliness—for then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around thee—and their will Shall overshadow thee: be still.

Edgar Allan Poe

Certainlie these things agree, The Priest, the Lawyer, & Death all three: Death takes both the weak and the strong. The lawyer takes from both right and wrong, And the priest from living and dead has his Fee.

Benjamin Franklin

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.

Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies
A lass unparalleled.

William Shakespeare

You may have a wen or a cancer upon your person and not be able to cut it out lest you bleed to death; but surely it is no way tocure it, to engraft it and spread it over your whole body.

Abraham Lincoln

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.

Death is Nature's remedy for all things...

Charles Dickens

Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci