I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

I’m doomed to die, right? Why should I care if I go to Hades either with gout in my leg or a runner’s grace? Plenty of people will carry me there.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

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.

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.

The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive. 

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

Let my epitaph be, “Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook.”

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

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

I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.