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.
But, oh! fell death's untimely frost,
That nipt my flower sae early.
O fairest flower! no sooner blown but blasted,
Soft silken primrose fading timelessly.
Who now travels that dark path from whose bourne they say no one returns.
That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place.
Death is the way to immortality. Love will begin when the world ends.
The gods conceal from those destined to live how sweet it is to die, that they may continue living.