Top 100 Death Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best death quotes ever written, picked out of the full death archive on QuoteForever. You will find Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Edgar Allan Poe, Don Delillo and Dwight L. Moody among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.

2

I intend to live forever, or die trying.

3

I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.

4

It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life.

5

I do not wish to die: but I care not if I were dead. [Lat., Emori nolo: sed me esse mortuum nihil aestimo.]

6

Come to the sunset tree! The day is past and gone; The woodman's axe lies free, And the reaper's work is done.

The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually ... - Thomas More 7

The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.

8

The constant recollection of death is the test of human conduct.

9

Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.

10

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

11

Dreams require down payments. Dreams are free, but the journey isn't. There is a price to pay. When you find your why you'll find your way. When you develop your will you will embark on your way. Many people start; few people finish. Many people have a dream; few people achieve their dreams.

12

‎"Those who give up dreams, do injury to their own hearts and cannot possibly enjoy a profound sense of fulfillment in the end.

13

Every great dream begins with a dreamer.

14

Your dreams tell you what to do; your reason tells you how to do it.

15

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

16

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.

17

Our dreams disturb us because they refuse to pander to our fondest notions of ourselves. The closer one looks, the more they seem to insist upon a challenging proposition: You must live truthfully. Right now. And always. Few forces in life present, with an equal sense of inevitability, the bare-knuckle facts of who we are, and the demands of what we might become.

18

There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.

19

So many people want to live their lives and their dreams through their own Facebook page or their Twitter page. They want to show every detail of their life to everyone in the world. That scares me because I don't have any Facebook page or Twitter I don't like it, I don't want it.

20

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.

21

Unlike many Sixties rockers,[Bob] Dylan sang about getting old, about broken dreams. His return to roots music pointed the way for many of his contemporaries to forsake trying to sound 'current' and to instead make music that would stand the test of time.

22

2010 has been awesome. I got to write on the David Hasselhoff Roast this summer, and that's always been a dream.

23

The film [Dream of Life] is not really an amateur work, despite the fact that none of us have ever done anything like this before; aesthetically, none of us are amateurs.

24

I was making a film [Dream of Life] about Patti [Smith], but I was taking pictures, too.

25

Those who look at the surface of the sea must behold the birth and death of the waves, but those who seek the depths of the ocean behold one indivisible mass of water. Similarly, those who acknowledge "life" and "death" are tossed by sorrow, while those who live in the illimitable superconsciousness behold and feel the One Ineffable Bliss.

26

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

27

My uncle Sammy was an angry man. He had printed on his tombstone: What are you looking at?

28

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot.

29

Funerals are important rituals. They don't just recognize that a life has ended; they recognize that a life was lived.

30

To conquer death you only have to die.

31

If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.

32

The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out. Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation.

33

Homicide, /n./ The slaying of one human by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he died by one kind or another - the classification is for the advantage of the lawyers.

34

Death is only as strong as you believe it to be.

35

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side.

36

Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another.

37

When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.

38

Fight death all your days, and die knowing you know nothing.

39

The fence around a cemetery is foolish, for those inside can't come out and those outside don't want to get in.

40

There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.

41

Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.

42

Nature intends that, at fixed periods, men should succeed each other by the instrumentality of death. We shall never outwit Nature; we shall die as usual.

43

I'd rather die than go to heaven.

44

Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever.

45

Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we may diet.

46

... to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o'clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.

47

It is abundantly evident that, however natural it may be for us to feel sorrow at the death of our relatives, that sorrow is an error and an evil, and we ought to overcome it. There is no need to sorrow for them, for they have passed into a far wider and happier life. If we sorrow for our own fancied separation from them, we are in the first place weeping over an illusion, for in truth they are not separated from us; and secondly, we are acting selfishly, because we are thinking more of our own apparent loss than of their great and real gain.

48

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.

49

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful Earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the Earth and it is part of us.

50

The only way through death is death itself.

51

Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks.

52

Well-observed facts, though brought to light by passing theories, will never die; they are the material on which alone the house of science will at last be built.

53

I have only one curiosity left: death.

54

New studies show that 100% of all smokers die.

55

O pity the dead that are dead, but cannot make the journey, still they moan and beat against the silvery adamant walls of life's exclusive city.

56

We cannot hope to die peacefully if our lives have been full of violence, or if our minds have mostly been agitated by emotions like anger, attachment, or fear. So if we wish to die well, we must learn how to live well: Hoping for a peaceful death, we must cultivate peace in our mind, and in our way of life.

57

It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.

58

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.

59

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

60

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

61

To be clear, climate change is a true 800 pound gorilla in the room. The effects of global warming threaten global environmental upheaval over the coming century. But for South Florida and the Everglades, it could be our death knell if urgent action is not taken.

62

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

63

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

64

If a child shows himself incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate his kind.

65

It is long since I could have adventured on eternity, through God's mercy and Christ's merits; but death remained somewhat terrible, and that now is taken away; and now death is no more to me, but to cast myself into my husband's arms, and to lie down with Him.

66

The death of the forest is the end of our life.

67

Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody of East Northfield, is dead. Don't you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal-a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint; a body fashioned like unto His glorious body.

68

Christ never preached any funeral sermons.

69

After the first death, there is no other.

70

one day anyone died i guess (and noone stooped to kiss his face) busy folk buried them side by side little by little and was by was

71

There are two bodies - the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.

72

From a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down.

73

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.

74

Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.

75

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.

76

As the films of clay are removed from our eyes, Death loses the false aspect of the spectre, and we fall at last into its arms as a wearied child upon the bosom of its mother.

77

It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does ?

78

The city of Hiroshima stands as more than a monument to massive death and destruction. It stands as a living testament to the necessity for progress toward nuclear disarmament.

79

Sorrows come to stretch out places in the heart for joy.

80

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

81

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

82

Yes, people pull the trigger - but guns are the instrument of death. Gun control is necessary, and delay means more death and horror.

83

dying nowadays is more gruesome in many ways, namely, more lonely, mechanical, and dehumanized; at times it is even difficult to determine technically when the time of death has occurred.

84

Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means.

85

It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.

86

Throughout life, we get clues that remind us of the direction we are supposed to be headed if you stay focused, then you learn your lessons.

87

There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for.

88

Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more.

89

The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.

90

We have long had death and taxes as the two standards of inevitability. But there are those who believe that death is the preferable of the two.

91

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

92

When good men die their goodness does not perish.

93

The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

94

The death I should prefer would be to break my neck off the back of a good horse at a full gallop on a fine day.

95

The dead don't bother with particulars.

96

Let people who have to observe sickness and death look back and try to register in their observation the appearances which have preceded relapse, attack or death, and not assert that there were none, or that there were not the right ones. A want of the habit of observing conditions and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.

97

Death cannot alter facts - only feelings.

98

To judge of the real importance of the individual, we should think of the effect his death would produce.

99

Death is what makes life an event.

100

As all things eternal and primordial reappear, so all things mortal return to the earth. Honor, old age, probity, justice, constance, virtue, and gentleness are all gathered into the cold tomb.

More Death quotes

This is the short list. The full death quotes collection holds every quote on the subject in the archive, and the picture quotes are ready to share as images.

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