Quotes about life and death
656 quotes from 337 people
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us.
W. Somerset Maugham1874–1965The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 38, p. 129How life is strange and changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!
The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.
Cormac McCarthy1933–2023Stella Maris (2022)- Cormac McCarthy1933–2023The New York Times, April 19, 1992, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction” by Richard B. Woodward
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.When we die, our bodies are buried. When we live, our souls are buried.
H. L. Mencken1880–1956“Epitaph” from Smart Set (December 1921)
Stephenie Meyerborn 1973Twilight (2005), Preface, p. 1Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.
Henry Miller1891–1980“The Enormous Womb”, p. 96Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them!
Margaret Mitchell1900–1949Gone with the Wind (1936), pt. 4, ch. 38He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.
Michel de Montaigne1533–1592Essais, Book I, “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die” (tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842)
