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.
This increase in the world's population represents humanity's victory against death.
To be dead was a state which played odd tricks on dreams of vengeance.
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death.
I have no fear nor shrinking; I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me.
When once death has arrived, it does not return. So ever remain ready for it.
Am I alive? Death seems so hard to pin down in this century.