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.
In the real world, people die, and no self-promoting asshole in a fucking leotard can stop it.
Death is not the opposite of life; it exists as a part of them.
Oh, God! it is a fearful thing
To see the human soul take wing
In any shape, in any mood.
For dying is not to be feared—it is the final comfort. As we all learn, eventually.
So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
What new thing then is it for a man to die, whose whole life is nothing else but a journey to death?
Any one may take life from man, but no one death; a thousand gates stand open to it.
Death slue not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies.
And though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds,
There ’s a lean fellow beats all conquerors.