"He who dies with the most toys is, nonetheless, still dead."
-Anon.

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.
-Scottish Proverb

If it all be for naught, for nothingness at last,
Why does God make the world so fair?
Why spill this golden splendor out across the western hills,
And light the silver lamp of eve?
Why give me eyes to see, and soul to love so strong and deep?
Then, with a pang this brightness stabs me through,
And wakes within rebellious voice to cry against all death?
Why set this hunger for eternity to gnaw my heartstrings through,
If death ends all?
If death ends all, then evil must be good,
Wrong must be right, and beauty ugliness.
God is Judas who betrays His Son,
And with a kiss, damns all the world to Hell, --
If Christ rose not again.
[written by Unknown soldier, killed in World War I]
-Anon.

"Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box."
-Italian Proverb

I think of you often
and make no outward show,
But what it means to lose you,
no one will ever know
You wished no one farewell,
not even said good-bye,
You were gone before I knew it,
and only God knows why.
You are not forgotten
nor will you ever be,
As long as life and memories last,
I will remember thee.
To some you may be forgotten,
to others a part of the past,
But to me who loved you dearly,
your memories will always last.
Nothing can be more beautiful
than the memories I have of you.
To me, you were someone special,
God must have thought so too!
If tears could build a staircase
and memories a lane,
I would walk all the way to Heaven,
and bring you back again.
-Anon.

"Time is not what you think. Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning."
-Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

"Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage."
-Jean Anouilh, Beckett, 1959

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
-Isaac Asimov

There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven.
-Isaac Asimov

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.
-Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
-Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter's Eye, 1984

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
-Jean Baudrillard

"He would have liked his own funeral if he could have seen it. It was small and quiet, and really not at all pompous, as Michael had feared it might be. 'The dead,' he had said once, 'need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead.' At 22, it had sounded precocious; at 34, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known."
-Peter S. Beagle, A Fine And Private Place

A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.
-John Berger

"The end of birth is death; the end of death
Is birth: this is ordained! and mournest thou,
Chief of the stalwart arm! for what befalls
Which could not otherwise befall?"
-Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, verse 27 [translation (from Sanskrit) by Sir Edwin Arnold]

"If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one --
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds."
-Bhagavad Gita

"And another of his disciples said unto him, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.
But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead."
-Bible, Matthew 8:21-22

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
They mingle not with laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
written as a reaction to the high casualty rates of the British Expeditionary Force at Mons and Le Cateau
-Laurence Robert Binyon, For the Fallen (Sept. 21, 1914), September 21, 1914

Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.
-Robert Bolt

Death is an unsurpassable limit of human existence...[We discover the relationship which] is the basis for all feelings of reverance, fear, awe, wonder, sorrow, and deference in the face of something greater and more powerful...Only such a being-unto-death can guarantee the precondition that the Dasein be able to free itself from its absorption in, its submission and surrender of itself to the things and relationships of everyday living and to return to itself.
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-Medard Boss

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
-Alain de Botton, The Inevitable End "The Big Question"

It's like those eerie stories nurses tell,
Of how some actor on a stage played Death,
With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart,
And called himself the monarch of the world;
Then, going in the tire-room afterward,
Because the play was done, to shift himself,
Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly,
The moment he had shut the closet door,
By Death himself. Thus God might touch a Pope
At unawares, ask what his baubles mean,
And whose part he presumed to play just now.
Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true!
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-Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram's Apology, 1855

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
-William Cullen Bryant, Thanatopsis

Gently - so have good men taught -
Gently, and without grief, the old shall glide
Into the new; the eternal flow of things,
Like a bright river of the fields of heaven,
Shall journey onward in perpetual peace.
-William Cullen Bryant, An Evening Revery

Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being.
-Pearl Buck, I Believe, 1939

Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, "Did you bring joy?"
The second was, "Did you find joy?"
-Leo Buscaglia

"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd;
And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron, Destruction of Sennacherib, The

Why will we struggle to attain, and strive,
When all we gain is but an empty dream?--
Better, unto my thinking, doth it seem
To end it all and let who will survive;
To find at last all beauty is but dust;
That love and sorrow are the very same;
That joy is only suffering's sweeter name;
And sense is but the synonym of lust.
Far better, yea, to me it seems to die;
To set glad lips against the lips of Death--
The only thing God gives that comforteth,
The only thing we do not find a lie.
-Madison Cawein, from "The Land of Illusion"

I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't luckily have to bother about that.
-Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?
-Norman Cousins, Saturday Review - editorial

The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out. Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation...
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-Alphonse Daudet, Adapted from Julian Barnes's introduction to In The Land Of Pain by Alphonse Daudet. [translated and edited by Julian Barnes]

"Because I could not stop for Death --
He kindly stopped for me --
The carriage held but just ourselves
And immortality."
-Emily Dickinson, Because I Could Not Stop For Death

"Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brahma


"It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls."
-Epicurus

Death, the most dreaded of all evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.
-Epicurus, [letter]

A lion is much more dreadful to him that never saw him, than he is to his keeper who feedeth him every day. A pitched battle is more frightful and scaring to a new-listed soldier, that never took his place in the field before, nor saw the dreadful countenance of an army ready to engage, nor heard the thundering noise of cannon, and volleys of shot, the shouts of armies, and groans of dying men on every side, than it is to an old soldier who has been used to such things. The like we may observe in seamen, who it may be trembled at first, and now can sing in a storm.
Scarce any thing is more necessary for weak and timorous believers to meditate on, than the time of their separation. Our hearts will be apt to start and boggle at the first view of death; but it is good to do by them as men use to do by young colts; ride them up to that which they fright at, and make them smell to it, which is the way to cure them. "Look, as bread, says one, is more necessary than other food, so the meditation of death is more necessary than many other meditations." Every time we change our habitations, we should realise therein our great change: our souls must shortly leave this, and be lodged for a longer season in another mansion. When we put off our clothes at night, we have a fit occasion to consider, that we must strip nearer one of these days, and put off, not our clothes only, but the body that wears them too.
-John Flavel, "A Treatise of the Soul of Man"

I condole with you, we have lost a most dear and valuable relation, but it is the will of God and Nature that these mortal bodies be laid aside, when the soul is to enter into real life; 'tis rather an embrio state, a preparation for living; a man is not completely born until he be dead: Why should we grieve that a new child is born among the immortals? A new member added to their happy society? We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us, while they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of God -- when they become unfit for these purposes and afford us pain rather than pleasure -- instead of an aid, become an incumbrance and answer none of the intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that way. We ourselves prudently choose a partial death. In some cases a mangled painful limb, which cannot be restored, we willingly cut off -- He who plucks out a tooth, parts with it freely since the pain goes with it, and he that quits the whole body, parts at once with all pains and possibilities of pains and diseases it was liable to, or capable of making him suffer.
Our friend and we are invited abroad on a party of pleasure -- that is to last forever -- His chair was first ready and he is gone before us -- we could not all conveniently start together, and why should you and I be grieved at this, since we are soon to follow, and we know where to find him.
-Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Elizabeth Hubbart, who was grieving the death of her stepfather John Franklin, Benjamin's brother., February 22, 1756

"Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people."
-Kahlil Gibran, "The Voice of the Poet"

"Death is the only inescapable, unavoidable, sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we're born."
-Gary Mark Gilmore

Tomorrow we shall meet,
Death and I -.
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.
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-Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, p. 31

Don't strew me with roses after I'm dead.
When Death claims the light of my brow
No flowers of life will cheer me: instead
You may give me my roses now!
-Thomas F. Healey

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon:
As yet the early-rising Sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a Spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you, or any thing.
-Robert Herrick, To Daffodils

Death is nothing at all,
I have only slipped away into the next room,
I am I and you are you;
Whatever we were to each other, That we still are.
Call me by my old familiar name,
Speak to me in the easy way which you always used,
Put no difference in your tone,
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we shared together.
Let my name ever be the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant,
It is the same as it ever was, there is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner.
All is well.
-Henry Scott Holland, Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London

One night awaits all, and death's path must be trodden once and for all.
-Horace, Odes

Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?
-Victor Hugo

"Doctor, as I believe you would not choose to tell any thing but the truth, you had better tell him, that I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire."
-David Hume, Letter From Adam Smith, LL.D. to William Strachan, Esq.

And who shall separate the dust
What later we shall be:
Whose keen discerning eye will scan
And solve the mystery?
The high, the low, the rich, the poor,
The black, the white, the red,
And all the chromatique between,
Of whom shall it be said:
Here are the sons of Africa;
Here lies the dust of Rome;
Here lies the one unlabeled,
The world at large his home!
Can one then separate the dust?
Will mankind lie apart,
When life has settled back again
The same as from the start?
-Georgia Douglas Johnson, Commom Dust

"When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink."
-John Keats

"I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave - thank God for the quiet grave – O! I can feel the cold earth upon me – the daisies growing over me – O for this quiet – it will be my first."
-John Keats, letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., (speech; Detroit, Michigan), June 23, 1963

Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shedding its cocoon. It is a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.
-Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay, Horatius [Lays of Ancient Rome]

"Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still travelling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.
"When a good man dies,
For years beyond his ken,
The light he leaves behind him shines
Along the path of men."
-Alexander Russell Main, from "Life of A. B. Maston," by G. P. Pittman, 1909

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
-Thomas Merton

Led by long years to my last hours, too late, O world, I know your joys for what they are. You promise a peace which is not yours to give and the repose that dies before it is born. The years of fear and shame to which Heaven now set a term, renew nothing in me but the old sweet error in which, living overlong a man kills his soul with no gain to his body. I say and I know having put it to the proof, that he has the better part in Heaven whose death falls nearest his birth.
-Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sonnets of Michelangelo

"Here at last
We shall be free;
the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."
-John Milton, Paradise Lost

And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
-Vladimir Nabokov, “That In Aleppo Once ...,” Nabokov’s Dozen (1958)

"Beauty is but a flower,
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die;
Lord have mercy on us."
-Thomas Nash, Song in Time of Pestilence

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
-Dorothy Parker

I never see the prettiest thing -
A cherry bough gone white with Spring -
But what I think, "How gay 'twould be
To hang me from a flowering tree."
-Dorothy Parker, 'Cherry White', Death and Taxes (1931)

Life’s race well run,
Life’s work well done,
Life’s victory won,
Now cometh rest.
-Edward Hazen Parker, M.D., Funeral Ode on James A. Garfield

"The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever."
-Blaise Pascal, Pensees

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
-Charles Sanders Pierce

"What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal."
-Albert Pike, (attributed)

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
-Sylvia Plath, "Last Words"

"...After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. You know, the Stone was not such a wonderful thing. As much money and life and you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all -- the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them."
[spoken by the character Albus Dumbledore]
-J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

I spent millons of years in the world
of inorganic things
as a star, as a rock...
Then I died and became a plant--
Forgetting my former existence
because of its otherness
Then I died and became an animal--
Forgetting my life as a plant
except for inclinations in the season
of spring and sweet herbs--
like the inclination of babes
toward their mother's breast
Then I died and became a human
My intelligence ripened, awakening
from greed and self-seeking
to become wise and knowing
I behold a hundred thousand
intelligences most marvelous
and remember my former states
and inclinations
And when I die again
I will soar past the angels
to places I cannot imagine
Now, what have I ever lost by dying?
-Rumi, What Have I Ever Lost By Dying?

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Soon is the struggle past, and to the earth,
To the eternal sun, I render back
These atoms, joined in me for pain and pleasure.
… there remains naught save a modicum of senseless dust
Such is the end of man--the only spoil
We carry with us from life's battle-field,
Is but an insight into nothingness,
And utter scorn of all which once appeared
To us exalted and desirable.
-Friedrich von Schiller, Maid of Orleans, Act III, sc VI, (Talbot's dying words)

"Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who are thou then, if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly's uncurb'd steed,
Must, vainly shrieking, with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss."
-Friedrich von Schiller, Maid of Orleans, Act III, Scene VI, the English General Talbot says this as he is accepting death

There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

"But the man who dares to live his life with death before his eyes, the man who receives life back bit by bit and lives as though it did not belong to him by right but has been bestowed on him as a gift, the man who has such freedom and peace of mind that he has overcome death in his thoughts--such a man believes in eternal life because it is already his, it is a present experience, and he already benefits from its peace and joy. He cannot describe this experience in words. He may not be able to conform his view with the traditional picture of it. But one thing he knows for certain: Something within us does not pass away, something goes on living and working wherever the kingdom of the spirit is present. It is already working and living within us, because in our hearts we have been able to reach life by overcoming death."
source: http://home.pcisys.net/~jnf/schauth/rq8.html
-Albert Schweitzer, Reverence For Life

All are equal
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
-James Shirley, Death the Leveller

You gotta love livin', baby, 'cause dyin' is a pain in the ass.
-Frank Sinatra

I'm gonna live till I die.
-Frank Sinatra

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?
-Socrates, from Plato's Apology

The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it.......Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.
-Socrates

"One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
-Josef Stalin

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
-Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning" (1923)

Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
and the hunter home from the hill.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Requiem, (also used on Stevenson's Gravestone)

"But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetities, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies."
-Robert Louis Stevenson, from 'Aes Triplex'

Death is the end of life; ah why
Should life all labour be? . . .
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence - ripen, fall, and cease;
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Lotos-Eaters" (1833)

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.
-Leo Tolstoy

"The report of my death was an exaggeration."
-Mark Twain, After reading his own obituary, June 2, 1897

"I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, 'There she goes!'
Gone where? Gone from my sight ... that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There she goes!' there are other eyes watching her coming and their voices ready to take up the glad shouts 'Here she comes!'
-Henry Van Dyke, A Parable of Immortality

Our greatest prejudice is against death. It spans age, gender and race. We spend immeasurable amounts of energy fighting an event that will eventually triumph. Though it is noble not to give in easily, the most alive people I've ever met are those who embrace their death. They love, laugh and live more fully.
-Andy Webster

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.
-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, "Song Of Myself"

This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.
-Walt Whitman, Memories of President Lincoln, This Dust Was Once the Man, Leaves of Grass, 1891

"Men die, but sorrow never dies; The crowding years divide in vain, And the wide world is knit with ties of common brotherhood in pain."
-Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, The Cradle Tomb in Westminster Abbey

"A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists."
-Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, novel.