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.
Death is an equall doome
To good and bad, the common In of rest.
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
Teach him how to live,
And, oh still harder lesson! how to die.
Pale death, with impartial step, knocks at the hut of the poor and the towers of kings.
One night is awaiting us all, and the way of death must be trodden once.
This I ask, is it not madness to kill thyself in order to escape death?
Man should ever look to his last day, and no one should be called happy before his funeral.
It is an extreme evil to depart from the company of the living before you die.
It is uncertain in what place death may await thee; therefore expect it in any place.
Sometimes death is a punishment; often a gift; it has been a favor to many.