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Memorial Day Quotes

This page is assembled from three others: War, Death and Gratitude. There is no memorial collection underneath it. One poem is filed against the day itself, Joyce Kilmer’s, in Trees and Other Poems (1914), and it opens with a bugle that, he says, is not singing of war today.

The rest is whatever the three source pages rate highest, so it leans toward poetry and toward writers who saw war up close. Several famous lines about death and sacrifice carry flags here, so read the note on a quote’s own page before you attach a name to it.

Random quote on Memorial Day

Most quoted on memorial day:

Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before,
Advanced a stage or two upon that road
Which you must travel in the steps they trod.

Aristophanes

It is only the dead who do not return.

Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac speech (1794)

Heaven gave him all at once; then snatched away,
Ere mortals all his beauties could survey;
Just like the flower that buds and withers in a day.

John Dryden

Strange—is it not?—that of the myriads who
Before us passed the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the road
Which to discover we must travel too.

Omar Khayyám Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1120)

Before mine eyes in opposition sits
Grim Death, my son and foe.

John Milton

There is rust upon locks and hinges,
And mould and blight on the walls,
And silence faints in the chambers,
And darkness waits in the halls.

Louise Chandler Moulton

Out of the chill and the shadow,
Into the thrill and the shine;
Out of the dearth and the famine,
Into the fulness divine.

Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

So die as though your funeral
Ushered you through the doors that led
Into a stately banquet hall
Where heroes banqueted.

Alan Seeger

Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or, as we are told, it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another.

Socrates

O, I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as day cannot,
I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

Walt Whitman

It is not the fear of death
That damps my brow;
It is not for another breath
I ask thee now;
I could die with a lip unstirred.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

Ez fer war, I call it murder,—
Ther you hev it plain and flat;
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that.

James Russell Lowell The Biglow Papers (1848)

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

Martin Luther

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.

John Milton

The waves
Of the mysterious death-river moaned;
The tramp, the shout, the fearful thunder-roar
Of red-breathed cannon, and the wailing cry
Of myriad victims, filled the air.

George D. Prentice

I and my sword will earn our chronicle.

William Shakespeare

I would my son
Were in Arabia and thy tribe before him,
His good sword in his hand.

William Shakespeare

Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals
The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies!
But beautiful as songs of the immortals,
The holy melodies of love arise.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Beyond the worlds of war and peace, there is a field, and there are many women and men [who] are meeting there. Let us make this field a much bigger place. Let us all meet in that field.

Zainab Salbi

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

Smedley Butler

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