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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:

Of no distemper, of no blast he died,
But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long —
Even wondered at, because he dropped no sooner.
Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years,
Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more;
Till like a clock worn out with eating time,
The wheels of weary life at last stood still.

John Dryden Œdipus (1679)

War is a survival among us from savage times and affects now chiefly the boyish and unthinking element of the nation. The wisest realize that there are better ways for practicing heroism and other and more certain ends of insuring the survival of the fittest. It is something a people outgrow. But whether they consciously practice peace or not, nature in its evolution eventually practices it for them, and after enough of the inhabitants of a globe have killed each other off, the remainder must find it more advantageous to work together for the common good.

Percival Lowell Mars and its Canals (1906)

The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military’s motives.

Mark Riebling Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)

I don't care when I die, when you die, you die. What I don't want is to die in my bed. To be killed in an accident or to be shot is my preferred way to die.

Ashraf Pahlavi In Bitter American Exile, the Shah's Twin Sister, Ashraf, Defends Their Dynasty (1980)

If your mind is constantly preoccupied by your money and possessions, you are in reality only preparing the ground for rebirth as a spirit tortured by hunger and thirst. If your thoughts are obsessed with your family and loved ones, you are only strengthening the pangs of separation you will suffer when you die.

Dilgo Khyentse The Hundred Verses of Advice: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on What Matters Most (2005)

Honor to the Soldier, and Sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his country's cause. Honor also to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field, and serves, as he best can, the same cause—honor to him, only less than to him, who braves, for the common good, the storms of heaven and the storms of battle.

Abraham Lincoln

Violence has no constitutional sanction; and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.

William O. Douglas

What's hallow'd ground? Has earth a clod
Its Maker mean'd not should be trod
By man, the image of his God,
Erect and free,
Unscourged by Superstition's rod
To bow the knee.

Thomas Campbell

Where shall we make her grave?
Oh! where the wild flowers wave
In the free air!
When shower and singing-bird
'Midst the young leaves are heard,
There—lay her there!

Felicia Hemans

Yet shall thy grave with rising flow'rs be dressed,
And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast;
There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow,
There the first roses of the year shall blow.

Alexander Pope

…The low green tent
Whose curtain never outward swings.

John Greenleaf Whittier

The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay;
Sat by his fire, and talked the night away,
Wept o'er his wounds, or tales of sorrow done,
Shoulder'd his crutch, and show'd how fields were won.

Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village (1770)

Our God and Souldiers we alike adore,
Ev'n at the Brink of danger; not before:
After deliverance, both alike required;
Our God's forgotten, and our Souldiers slighted.

Francis Quarles

Beyond the shining and the shading
I shall be soon.
Beyond the hoping and the dreading
I shall be soon.
Love, rest and home—
Lord! tarry not, but come.

Horatius Bonar

And I still onward haste to my last night;
Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly;
So every day we live, a day we die.

Thomas Campion

Then fell upon the house a sudden gloom,
A shadow on those features fair and thin;
And softly, from the hushed and darkened room,
Two angels issued, where but one went in.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The conqueror is not so much pleased by entering into open gates, as by forcing his way. He desires not the fields to be cultivated by the patient husbandman; he would have them laid waste by fire and sword. It would be his shame to go by a way already opened.

Lucan

And silence broods like spirit on the brae,
A glimmering moon begins, the moonlight runs
Over the grasses of the ancient way
Rutted this morning by the passing guns.

John Masefield

She saw her sons with purple death expire,
Her sacred domes involved in rolling fire,
A dreadful series of intestine wars,
Inglorious triumphs and dishonest scars.

Alexander Pope

They came with banner, spear, and shield;
And it was proved in Bosworth field,
Not long the Avenger was withstood—
Earth help'd him with the cry of blood.

William Wordsworth

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