“Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.”

“Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

“And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.”

Oscar Wilde book The Ballad of Reading Gaol

“Much more definitive and much more lasting than all the gold that one can accumulate is the gratitude of a people.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

“When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.”

Judith Lewis Herman (1942) American psychiatrist

“In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

“The dead are way more organized than the living.”

China Miéville book Un Lun Dun

“The living need charity more than the dead.”

George Arnold (1834–1865) American author and poet

“And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry
the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“A rose to the living is more
Than sumptuous wreaths to the dead.”

Nixon Waterman (1859–1944) American writer