Halloween is the one time of year when death takes center stage in the West. Skeletons hang from porches, skulls grin from mantelpieces, and giant grim reapers show up in the seasonal aisle at Home Depot. For a few weeks, the thing we spend the rest of the year avoiding becomes incredibly visible.
It’s a good time to practice a little memento mori — to remember that we’re all going to die someday.
To help you do that, we’ve put together a collection of quotes on death from writers and philosophers throughout the ages. Some are sobering and some are comforting.
So read on and take a few minutes to contemplate the fear, the hope, and the mystery that surrounds death.
And after you’ve reflected on these quotes, make sure to check out our recent podcast interview with Joanna Ebenstein that’s all about how meditating on death can help us live fuller lives (many of the quotes below come from her fantastic book).
“It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.”
Montaigne
“Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.”
William Mitford
“We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.”
Germaine de Staël
“One may live as a conqueror, a king, or a magistrate; but he must die a man. The bed of death brings every human being to his pure individuality, to the intense contemplation of that deepest and most solemn of all relations—the relation between the creature and his Creator.”
Daniel Webster
“Death is the crown of life. Were death denied, poor man would live in vain; to live would not be life; even fools would wish to die.”
Owen D. Young
“To neglect, at any time, preparation for death, is to sleep on our post at a siege; to omit it in old age, is to sleep at an attack.”
Samuel Johnson
“There is but this difference between the death of old men and young men; old men go to death, and death comes to young men.”
Francis Bacon
“He who should teach men to die would at the same time, teach them to live.”
Montaigne
“A dislike of death is no proof of the want of religion. The instincts of nature shrink from it, for no creature can like its own dissolution.”
William Jay
“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“It is as natural to man to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps the one is as painful as the other.”
Francis Bacon
“When the sun goes below the horizon, he is not set; the heavens glow for a full hour after his departure. And when a great and good man sets, the sky of this world is luminous long after he is out of sight. Such a man cannot die out of this world. When he goes he leaves behind much of himself. Being dead he speaks.”
Henry Ward Beecher
“I know of but one remedy against the fear of death that is effectual and that will stand the test either of a sick-bed, or of a sound mind—that is, a good life, a clear conscience, an honest heart, and a well-ordered conversation; to carry the thoughts of dying men about us, and so to live before we die as we shall wish we had when we come to it.”
John Norris
“Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.”
Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“Death is like a mirror in which the true meaning of life is reflected.”
Sogyal Rinpoche
“Death twitches my ear. 'Live,' he says. 'I am coming.'”
Virgil
“Perhaps this knowledge of death, as a force that impinges on the individual, the community, and the cosmos, is what marks our species as, potentially, wise.”
Dr. Carol Zaleski
“In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.”
Henry Miller
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
Franz Kafka
“Dying is a wild night and a new road.”
Emily Dickinson
“For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”
Kahlil Gibran
“Death is just infinity closing in.”
Jorge Luis Borges
“Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
Vladimir Nabokov
“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.”
Hermann Hesse
“Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death…. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being.”
Carl Jung
“Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”
Walt Whitman
“Death. The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity—and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. Death stands before eternity and says YES.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
Edgar Allan Poe
“There is no death. Only a change of worlds.”
Chief Seattle
“Of all the gods only death does not desire gifts.”
Aeschylus
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Thornton Wilder
“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”
George Eliot
“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
Mitch Albom
“Those who are afraid of death will carry it on their shoulders.”
Federico García Lorca
“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
Ernest Hemmingway
“Death is seen as an enemy only by those who set themselves in opposition to nature.”
June Singer
“Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”
Epicurus
“All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace.”
David Mamet
“Rehearse death. To say this is to tell a man to rehearse his freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
Seneca
“Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.”
Hannah Arendt
“They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies.”
William Penn
“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life—and only then will I be free to become myself.”
Martin Heidegger
“No art is possible without a dance with death.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.”
Wallace Stevens
“He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man.”
Seneca
“Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.”
Albert Camus
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which know me not, I am frightened and astonished.”
Blaise Pascal
“Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
C. S. Lewis
