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.
When I lived, I provided for every thing but death; now I must die, and am unprepared.
Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
Death rides on every passing breeze,
He lurks in every flower.
But thousands die without or this or that,
Die, and endow a college or a cat.
Soon the shroud shall lap thee fast,
And the sleep be on thee cast
That shall ne'er know waking.
As soon as man, expert from time, has found
The key of life, it opes the gates of death.
No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.
GRAVE, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student.