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Death quotes

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“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.” Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“To be, or not to be, that is the Question” William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Our life is made by the death of others.” Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

“While you do not know life, how can you know about death?” Confucius, Analects

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.” George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“And do you know, there's less charm in life, when one thinks of death, but there's more peace.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.” J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“I must be gone and live, or stay and die.” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

“To die hating them, that was freedom.” George Orwell, 1984

“The thing to me worse than death was the betrayal. I could conceive death.” Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Ah, if he could only die temporarily!” Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.” Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace.” Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

“It was not, after all, so easy to die.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote.” Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Only the dead stay 17 for ever.” Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.” Honoré de Balzac, Letters of Two Brides

“Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?” Woody Allen, Getting Even

“Man dies, but glory lives!” Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

“Therefore it is that man dies in despair while the Spirit dies in ecstasy.” Honoré de Balzac, Séraphîta

“Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.” Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

“Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; Life and these lips have long been separated: Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack: the round world should have shook lions into civil streets, and citizens to their dens.” William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.” George Orwell, 1984

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.” Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“If life must not be taken too seriously—then so neither must death.” Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

“Death was a friend, and sleep was death’s brother.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief and I tried very hard to die but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“For I can suffer, and be still; And come he slow, or come he fast, It is but Death who comes at last.” Walter Scott, Marmion

“The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon...” Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

“I just don't want to die without a few scars, I say.” Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“He drew the dagger and laid it on the table between them; a length of dragonbone and Valyrian steel, as sharp as the difference between right and wrong, between true and false, between life and death.” George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“This feather stirs; she lives! If it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.” William Shakespeare, King Lear

“For death is gain to him whose life, like mine, Is full of misery.” Sophocles, Antigone

“I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

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Related topics

life love loneliness living time suicide youth suffering heaven birth madness pain war grief mortality survival dilemma darkness fear freedom

Related authors

William Shakespeare (36)
Chuck Palahniuk (16)
Albert Camus (5)
John Green (14)
George Orwell (4)
Kurt Vonnegut (4)
Virginia Woolf (3)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (3)
J. K. Rowling (10)
George R. R. Martin (8)
J. D. Salinger (6)
Samuel Butler (6)
Haruki Murakami (4)
Herman Melville (4)
George MacDonald (4)
Neil Gaiman (3)
Oscar Wilde (3)
Victor Hugo (3)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (3)
Ray Bradbury (3)

Related sources

The Fault in Our Stars (9)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (6)
Lilith (4)
Fight Club (8)
Julius Caesar (6)
The Catcher in the Rye (6)
Romeo and Juliet (5)
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (5)
Hamlet (4)
Antony and Cleopatra (4)
A Game of Thrones (4)
Moby-Dick (4)
Survivor (3)
Les Misérables (3)
The Plague (3)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (3)
Henry IV, Part 2 (3)
Slaughterhouse-Five (3)
Meditations (3)
Norwegian Wood (3)

Links

William Shakespeare quotes about death · Life quotes about death