Skip to content

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.

Random quote on Death

Most quoted on death:

Strange—is it not?—that of the myriads who
Before us passed the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the road
Which to discover we must travel too.

Omar Khayyám Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1120)

Before mine eyes in opposition sits
Grim Death, my son and foe.

John Milton

There is rust upon locks and hinges,
And mould and blight on the walls,
And silence faints in the chambers,
And darkness waits in the halls.

Louise Chandler Moulton

Out of the chill and the shadow,
Into the thrill and the shine;
Out of the dearth and the famine,
Into the fulness divine.

Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

So die as though your funeral
Ushered you through the doors that led
Into a stately banquet hall
Where heroes banqueted.

Alan Seeger

Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or, as we are told, it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another.

Socrates

O, I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as day cannot,
I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

Walt Whitman

It is not the fear of death
That damps my brow;
It is not for another breath
I ask thee now;
I could die with a lip unstirred.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

No man escapes Death. So Death must not be the enemy. Life must not be the prize. It must be the gameboard, on which Death teaches its savage lessons. You could heed those lessons, or ignore them, but never evade them.
Death, then, was the ally. Not to be sought, but heeded.

Steven Barnes Gorgon Child (1989)

There is no harm in patience, and no profit in lamentation. Death is easier to bear (than) that which precedes it, and more severe than that which comes after it. Remember the death of the Apostle of God, and your sorrow will be lessened.

Abu Bakr

Take them, O Grave! and let them lie
Folded upon thy narrow shelves,
As garments by the soul laid by,
And precious only to ourselves!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Dark lattice! letting in eternal day!

Edward Young

All has its date below; the fatal hour
Was register'd in Heav'n ere time began.
We turn to dust, and all our mightiest works
Die too.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

Behold—not him we knew!
This was the prison which his soul looked through.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Vital spark of heavenly flame!
Quit, oh quit this mortal frame.

Alexander Pope

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs Address at Stanford University (2005)

Tell me, my soul, can this be death?

Alexander Pope The Dying Christian to His Soul (1712)

For I say this is death and the sole death,—
When a man's loss comes to him from his gain,
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance,
And lack of love from love made manifest.

Robert Browning A Death in the Desert (1864)

Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?
Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain;
And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn.

Edward Young Night-Thoughts (1742)

Dying visions of angels and Christ and God and heaven are confined to credibly good men. Why do not bad men have such visions? They die of all sorts of diseases; they have nervous temperaments; they even have creeds and hopes about the future which they cling to with very great tenacity; why do not they rejoice in some such glorious illusions when they go out of the world?

Enoch Fitch Burr Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Related topics