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.
Preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death.
There’s nothing like a stupid, accidental death to remind you of the supreme futility of everything.
Wheresoever ye be, death will overtake you, although ye be in lofty towers.
You know death must overtake you but you make no preparation for it.
To witness titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal.
When life is so burdensome death has become a sought after refuge.
Death is the looking-glass of life wherein
Each man may scan the aspect of his deeds.
It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying which is terrible.
The universe has resources of death which we have barely begun to pick at.
Death would be so much easier to dance with if it weren’t surrounded by the clutter of civilization.