Death Quotes


The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.
– Thomas Paine

Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
– Patrick Henry
Call no man happy till he is dead.
– Aeschylus
Death is softer by far than tyranny.
– Aeschylus
Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.
– Saul Alinsky
There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?
– Woody Allen
To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.
– Jean Anouilh
Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage.
– Jean Anouilh
Our law is a Jordanian law that we inherited, which applies to both the West Bank and Gaza, and sets the death penalty for those who sell land to Israelis.
– Yasser Arafat
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
– Hannah Arendt
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
– Hannah Arendt
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.
– Aristotle
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
– W. H. Auden
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
– W. H. Auden
Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.
– Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
A man whose life has been dishonourable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death.
– Lucius Accius
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
– Sir Francis Bacon
No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
– Walter Bagehot
The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates.
– Dave Barry
What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
– Dave Barry
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
– Jean Baudrillard
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.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Birth was the death of him.
– Samuel Beckett
Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
– Henry Ward Beecher
When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
– Brendan Behan
Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.
– Hilaire Belloc
I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry.
– Robert Benchley
Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.
– Ambrose Bierce
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
Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death.
– Omar N. Bradley
Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.
– Sir Thomas Browne
If some persons died, and others did not die, death would be a terrible affliction.
– Jean de la Bruyere
Man has but three events in his life: to be born, to live, and to die. He is not conscious of his birth, he suffers at his death and he forgets to live.
– Jean de la Bruyere
The passion of hatred is so long lived and so obstinate a malady that the surest sign of death in a sick person is their desire for reconciliation.
– Jean de la Bruyere
I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death.
– Leo Burnett
If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
– Samuel Butler
Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.
– Samuel Butler
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
'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.
– Lord Byron
If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.
– Michelangelo
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
– Mary Catherine Bateson
Which death is preferably to every other? The unexpected.
– Julius Caesar
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
– Albert Camus
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
– Albert Camus
He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.
– Elias Canetti
There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
– Elias Canetti
At a formal dinner party, the person nearest death should always be seated closest to the bathroom.
– George Carlin
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
– George Carlin
For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.
– Johnny Carson
My father was a man of love. He always loved me to death. He worked hard in the fields, but my father never hit me. Never. I don't ever remember a really cross, unkind word from my father.
– Johnny Cash
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
– Willa Cather
Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.
– Coco Chanel
We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.
– Deepak Chopra
Life inspires more dread than death-it is life which is the great unknown.
– Emile M. Cioran
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
– Emile M. Cioran
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
– Jean Cocteau
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
– Jean Cocteau
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
– Jean Cocteau
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
– Jean Cocteau
You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
– Jean Cocteau
A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The enemy fought with savage fury, and met death with all its horrors, without shrinking or complaining: not one asked to be spared, but fought as long as they could stand or sit.
– Davy Crockett
Death comes not to the living soul, nor age to the loving heart.
– Phoebe Cary
I'm not afraid of death; but dying scares the hell out of me.
– Jack Cleary
The end of the animal trade would leave more time to trap or beat to death pop star wannabes.
– Simon Cowell
The kids out there want something they can relate to, something that's real; most of that whiny stuff isn't real. The cheesy pop songs just bore me to death.
– Jonathan Davis
People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.
– Denis Diderot
Grumbling is the death of love.
– Marlene Dietrich
When you're dead, you're dead. That's it.
– Marlene Dietrich
Sin brought death, and death will disappear with the disappearance of sin.
– Mary Baker Eddy
Sinful and forbidden pleasures are like poisoned bread; they may satisfy appetite for the moment, but there is death in them at the end.
– Tryon Edwards
We weep over the graves of infants and the little ones taken from us by death; but an early grave may be the shortest way to heaven.
– Tryon Edwards
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
– George Eliot
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
– T. S. Eliot
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
– Henry Ellis
Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.
– Epicurus
It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.
– Epicurus
The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death.
– Desiderius Erasmus
No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.
– Euripides
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
– Susan Ertz
Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.
– Edna Ferber
Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.
– Edna Ferber
You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.
– Ian Fleming
Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.
– Jean de La Fontaine
I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.
– George Fox
I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.
– Benjamin Franklin
The goal of all life is death.
– Sigmund Freud
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
– James Anthony Froude
Between our birth and death we may touch understanding, As a moth brushes a window with its wing.
– Christopher Fry
Let us all be brave enough to die the death of a martyr, but let no one lust for martyrdom.
– Mahatma Gandhi
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
The U.S. couldn't even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They'll be killing each other again in less than a year. I'm sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.
– Bill Gates
Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.
– Kahlil Gibran
If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.
– Kahlil Gibran
I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
– Jean Giraudoux
A useless life is an early death.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
An unused life is an early death.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe