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Quotes about life and death

656 quotes from 337 people

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It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
Mary Shelley1797–1851Frankenstein (1818), Chapter VIn context
- Science
Live, and be happy, and make others so.
Mary Shelley1797–1851Frankenstein (1818), Chapter VIIIIn context
- Happiness
All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life?
Mary Shelley1797–1851Frankenstein (1818), Chapter XIn context
- Emotion
Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?
Mary Shelley1797–1851Frankenstein (1818), Chapter XVIn context
- Philosophy
I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.
Mary Shelley1797–1851Frankenstein (1818), Chapter XXIVIn context
For the dead travel fast.
Bram Stoker1847–1912Dracula (1897), Chapter IIn context
Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;⁠—the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!
Charles Dickens1812–1870A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book the Third: The Track of a Storm, Chapter VIn context
- Liberty
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
Charles Dickens1812–1870A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book the Third: The Track of a Storm, Chapter XVIn context
Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
Charles Dickens1812–1870Great Expectations (1861), Chapter IXIn context
- Change
Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together
Charles Dickens1812–1870Great Expectations (1861), Chapter XXVIIIn context
- Friendship
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
Charles Dickens1812–1870A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave IIn context
Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child.
Charles Dickens1812–1870A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave IIIIn context
- Charity
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Charles Dickens1812–1870David Copperfield (1850), Chapter 1In context
- Character
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
Charles Dickens1812–1870Bleak House (1853), Chapter XLVIIIn context
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804–1864The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter IIn context
- Justice