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Quotes about life and death

656 quotes from 337 people

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Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Walt Whitman1819–1892O Captain! My Captain! (1865)In context
- Leadership
That you are here⁠—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Walt Whitman1819–1892O Me! O Life! (1867)In context
- Motivation & Goals
- Poetry
Life is ever lord of Death
And Love can never lose its own.
John Greenleaf Whittier1807–1892Snow Bound, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
- Love
What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life — that is what is abnormal.
Elie Wiesel1928–2016Interview in O, The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
Oscar Wilde1854–1900
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
Oscar Wilde1854–1900Salomé (1893)
- Love
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
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder1897–1975The Woman of Andros (1930), based on Terence’s Andria
We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
Tennessee Williams1911–1983Orpheus Descending (1957), Val (Act 2, Scene 1)
It doesn’t matter how many people I’ve killed. What matters is how I get along with the people who are still alive.
Bruce Willisborn 1955The Whole Nine Yards
My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.
Oprah Winfreyborn 1954
Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein1889–1951Last words, to his doctor’s wife (28 April 1951)–as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 100
Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable, and life is more than a dream.
Mary Wollstonecraft1759–1797Letters Written in Sweden (1796)
Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
Virginia Woolf1882–1941The Common Reader (1925), “Modern Fiction”
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
Virginia Woolf1882–1941Jacob’s Room (1922), Ch. 8