The long sleep of death closes our scars, and the short sleep of life our wounds.
Death Quotes
The poets dominate here. Edward Young, Longfellow and Seneca are tied for the most entries, with Tennyson, Pope and Byron close behind. A few lines are better known than their authors. Samuel Johnson’s remark that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully comes from Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791). Dryden’s “Death in itself is nothing; but we fear / To be we know not what, we know not where” is from Aureng-Zebe (1676).
The line most often credited to Stalin, that one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic, is flagged as misattributed. Wikiquote traces a version of it to a French satirical paper in 1924, where a diplomat says it in what is probably an invented anecdote. It was pinned on Stalin by a newspaper columnist in 1947, with no evidence offered.
This day, which thou fearest as thy last, is the birthday of eternity.
All that tread,
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.
Hushed in the alabaster arms of Death
Our young Marcellus sleeps.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
The grave unites; where e'en the great find rest,
And blended lie th' oppressor and th' oppressed!
They bore him barefac'd on the bier;
* * * * *
And in his grave rain'd many a tear.
Lay her i' the earth;
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!
Our father's dust is left alone
And silent under other snows.