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.
A heap of dust remains of thee;
'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be!
Death takes the mean man with the proud;
The fatal urn has room for all.
Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep,
And yet a third of life is pass'd in sleep.
Our souls are prisoners of the terror of death, and the day is beautiful.
Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.
The world has created no living thing it does not intend to destroy.
Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long'd for death.
And God said, "A way must be conceived to pursue the dead beyond the tomb."
Death alone discloses how insignificant are the puny bodies of men.