Death keeps no calendar.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.

Man has here two and a half minutes—one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.

The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.

Is this dying? Is this all? Is this all that I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this! I can bear it!

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

A god cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good.

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and, looking at each other with grief and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.