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.
So that he seemed to depart not from life, but from one home to another.
We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning.
O, sir! the good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.
I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils.
Trust to a plank, draw precarious breath,
At most seven inches from the jaws of death.
For death betimes is comfort, not dismay,
And who can rightly die needs no delay.