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.

Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

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

I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.

Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.

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.

If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself. 

Death renders all equal.

What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.

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