Skip to content

Halloween Quotes

Halloween has almost nothing of its own on Wikiquote, so the page is built from fear and death. The one entry filed against the holiday is from Jeffrey Ford’s The Empire of Ice Cream (2006): the narrator says Halloween was close and was the favourite holiday because it lacked the holiness of Christmas.

What you get otherwise is Shakespeare on fear and Bertrand Russell on what it does to people, with comedians in between. It will not be seasonal in tone. If you want scary, search for it. If you want something that works as a caption, start here and check the flags.

Random quote on Halloween

Most quoted on halloween:

The next two hundred years will see the abolition of death, as we now understand that great transition, and the establishing of the soul's existence. The soul will be known as an entity, as the motivating impulse, and the spiritual centre back of all manifested forms. . . . Our essential immortality will be demonstrated and realised to be a fact in nature.

Alice Bailey

It was stupid to feel fear. Fear was nothing but the body’s involuntary response to perceived threats. Fear increased heartbeat, respiration, and perspiration; fear clouded the mind and paralyzed the limbs, and I’m going to die wasn’t subject to logical arguments about its counterproductivity.

Adam-Troy Castro Emissaries From the Dead (2008)

“I do not wish to experience that again.”
“Some people claim that the occasional exposure to fear enhances their enjoyment of more tranquil circumstances.”
“Some people ought to be confined for their own good,” my assistant said, “and to prevent them from spreading dangerous inanities.”

Matthew Hughes The Spiral Labyrinth (2007)

What does one do when it comes time to die? Turn/one's face to the wall?/Grab the shoulders of the person who is closest, who listens?/Does one break into a run, like a man whose clothing/is on fire, and make a dash to the finish?

Rosario Castellanos

… In shepherd's phrase
With one foot in the grave.

William Wordsworth

It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man, so weak, but it mates, and masters, the fear of death; and therefore, death is no such terrible enemy, when a man hath so many attendants about him, that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear preoccupieth it.

Francis Bacon Essays (1625)

The real contact between any two friends, living or "dead," is the contact of mutual understanding and love, and the inspiration of worth-while things undertaken in common. Why is it not possible for such relationships to pass untroubled through death, and back to life again? Such is, perhaps, the wisest teaching of all the ages, because it is at once the most natural and the most hopeful.

Helena Blavatsky

For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
Take at my hands this garland and farewell.
Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

Leo Tolstoy

"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in Heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"

William Wordsworth

The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

James Shirley

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

Christina Rossetti

Mid youth and song, feasting and carnival,
Through laughter, through the roses, as of old
Comes Death, on shadowy and relentless feet
Death, unappeasable by prayer or gold;
Death is the end, the end.
Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greet
Death as a friend!

Rupert Brooke

All flesh is grass, and all its glory fades
Like the fair flower dishevell'd in the wind;
Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream;
The man we celebrate must find a tomb,
And we that worship him, ignoble graves.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

Karma takes no account of custom; and the karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all... The fate of the cruel must fall also upon all who go out intentionally to kill God's creatures, and call it "sport".

Jiddu Krishnamurti At the Feet of the Master (1911)

If life has not made youby God's grace, through faith, holy — think you, will death, without faith do it? The cold waters of that narrow stream are no purifying bath in which you may wash and be clean. No! no! as you go down into them, you will come up from them.

Alexander Maclaren Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Still...let's talk about fear. We won't raise our voices and we won't scream; we'll talk rationally, you and I. We'll talk about the way the good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unraveling with shocking suddenness.

Stephen King

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we… remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment unpopular.

Edward R. Murrow

Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

Things of real worth, such as the mental life of the ant or the crab, fill psychological and scientific literature; but such a thing as death, which involves the whole human race more intimately than anything else possibly can - since all must die - is regarded as hardly worthy of serious discussion!

Charles Webster Leadbeater The Other Side of Death (1903)

Related topics