I’m not afraid of death. It’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.
~ Woody Allen
Now comes the mystery.
~ Last words of evangelist Henry Ward Beecher, March 8, 1887
No one has yet believed in God and the Kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour–waiting and looking forward to being released from bodily existence.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
How do we know that dying is so dreadful? who knows whether in our human fear and anguish, we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just waht is so marvelous, that we can transform death.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
~ Sir Thomas Browne, in Hyddriotaphia
We don’t know yet about life, how can we know about death?
~ Confucius, in Aphorisms
Because I would not stop for Death–
He kindly stopped for me–
The carriage held but just ourselves–
And Immortality.
~ Emily Dickinson
No man is an Iland intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is thelesse, as well as if a promontorie were, as well as if a mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
~ John Donne, in Devotions
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
~ John Donne
Keep before your eyes from day to day death and exile and all things that seem terrible, but death most of all, and then you will never set your thoughts on what is low and will never desire anything beyond measure.
~ Epictetus, in The Encheiridion
Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.
~ Epicurus, in Principal Doctrines
Never knock on Death’s door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!
~ Matt Frewer
Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.
~ Dag Hammarskjold, in Markings
We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.
~ Victor Hugo
Death is no more than passing from one room into another.
~ Helen Keller
All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has ever read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
~ C.S. Lewis, in The Last Battle
Love makes us poets and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
~ George Santayana
Of all great wonders, none is greater than man. Only for death can he find no cure.
~ Sophocles
I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
~ Mark Twain
