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.
If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.
Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot.
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits.
While there's life there’s hope, and only the dead have none.
They say in the grave there is peace, and peace and the grave are one and the same.
Yes, death, — the hourly possibility of it, — death is the sublimity of life.
Everyone dies—the rearrangement of when is a matter of only statistical interest.