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Quotes about life and death

656 quotes from 337 people

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I am on the hilltop and must go down into the valley; and when Uncas follows in my footsteps there will no longer be any of the blood of the Sagamores, for my boy is the last of the Mohicans.
James Fenimore Cooper1789–1851The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Chapter IIIIn context
- Family
It is better for a man to die at peace with himself than to live haunted by an evil conscience!
James Fenimore Cooper1789–1851The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Chapter VIIIIn context
- Morality
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.
Arthur Conan Doyle1859–1930The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891–1892), A Case of IdentityIn context
She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
Virginia Woolf1882–1941Mrs Dalloway (1925), Part 1In context
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
Virginia Woolf1882–1941Mrs Dalloway (1925), Part 1In context
- Love
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
Virginia Woolf1882–1941Mrs Dalloway (1925), Part 10In context
One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever.
Frances Hodgson Burnett1849–1924The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter XXIIn context
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
Jack London1876–1916The Call of the Wild (1903), Chapter IIIIn context
- Happiness
What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky1821–1881The Idiot (1869), Part I, Chapter VIn context
- Time
Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of mankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away.
Homer900–800 BCThe Iliad (8th century BC), Book VIIn context
- Nature
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Dante Alighieri1265–1321The Divine Comedy (c. 1320), Inferno, Canto IIn context
For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!
Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849The Cask of Amontillado (1846)In context
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated
John Donne1572–1631No Man Is an Island (1624)In context
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
Oscar Wilde1854–1900The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), Part IIIIn context
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965The Waste Land (1922), IIn context