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.
Men drop so fast, ere life's mid stage we tread,
Few know so many friends alive, as dead.
Down to the dust! — and, as thou rott'st away,
Even worms shall perish on thy poisonous clay.
O heart, and mind, and thoughts! what thing do you
Hope to inherit in the grave below?
What then remains but that we still should cry
Not to be born, or, being born, to die?
Early, bright, transient, chaste as morning dew,
She sparkled, was exhal'd and went to heaven.
[Words he used to refuse heart surgery the day before he passed away.]
The sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd,
Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws.
Graves they say are warm'd by glory;
Foolish words and empty story.
This is the field and Acre of our God,
This is the place where human harvests grow!