Quotes about life and death
656 quotes from 337 people
Benjamin Franklin1706–1790Letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy (13 November 1789), quoting a popular phrase dated back to the 1716 play The Cobbler of Preston, written by Christopher Bullock.
Buckminster Fuller1895–1983The Wellspring of Reality
Walt Whitman1819–1892Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Starting from Paumanok. 12I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.
Walt Whitman1819–1892Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.The knight’s bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge1772–1834“The Knight’s Tomb”, l. 9 (c. 1817)
Ludwig Wittgenstein1889–1951Last words, to his doctor’s wife (28 April 1951)–as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 100A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.
Helen Keller1880–1968The Simplest Way to be Happy (1933)And in the wreck of noble lives
Something immortal still survives.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1807–1882The Building of the Ship, Lines 375-376.What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers
May be heaven’s distant lamps.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1807–1882Resignation, St. 4.There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery.
Dante Alighieri1265–1321The Divine Comedy (1320), Inferno, Canto V, lines 121-123, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation (1867)In context
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881Richter (1827).The soul, secured in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.
Joseph Addison1672–1719Cato, A Tragedy (1713)- Joseph Addison1672–1719Cato, A Tragedy (1713), Act IV, scene iv
John Donne1572–1631Holy Sonnets, No. 13, line 1
