Quotes about death
A collection of quotes on the topic of sadness, life, pain, disease.
Best quotes about death
“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”
“Sleep. Those little slices of death. How I loathe them.”
Various forms of this quote are attributed to Poe, primarily by a title card in the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, though there is no record of his having ever said it.
Misattributed
“Once you label me you negate me.”
As attributed in Journal of Marriage and Family Counseling, Vol. 2 (1976) by American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors, p. 33; no earlier incidents have been located.
Variants:
When you label me, you negate me.
As attributed in Inner Joy (1985) by Kory Bloomfield, p 169
Disputed
Variant: What labels me, negates me.
“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”
le mystère de l'amour est plus grand que le mystère de la mort.
Source: Salomé (1893)
“Laugh at death and die of laughter.”
Attributed
“Love has no age, no limit; and no death.”
Quotes about death
“For a writer, life must be the focus that death illuminates daily.”
Source: Para un escritor la vida debe ser el foco que la muerte ilumina a diario.
Source: Zárate, Y. (2019). "José Baroja". En revista Momentos Ahora o nunca. Número 139. Tlaxcala, México; p. 24.
“Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”
Statement to reporters after his death sentences, taken from The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/07/richard-ramirez-night-stalker-dies
“There is no death without life. Therefore, death depends entirely on life.”
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
Variants: One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic.
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
When one dies, it is a tragedy. When a million die, it is a statistic.
In Портрет тирана (1981) (Portrait of a Tyrant), Soviet historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko attributes the following version to Stalin: "When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics." This is the alleged response of Stalin during the 1943 Tehran conference when Churchill objected to an early opening of a second front in France.<!-- The book appears to have a footnote sourceing the claim, but I couldn't access it. Could someone please try to scare up a paper copy and have a look at footnote 188? -->
In her review "Mustering Most Memorable Quips" of Konstantin Dushenko's 1997 Dictionary of Modern Quotations (Словарь современных цитат: 4300 ходячих цитат и выражений ХХ века, их источники, авторы, датировка), Julia Solovyova states: "Russian historians have no record of the lines, 'Death of one man is a tragedy. Death of a million is a statistic,' commonly attributed by English-language dictionaries to Josef Stalin."
This quotation may originate from "Französischer Witz" (1925) by Kurt Tucholsky: "Darauf sagt ein Diplomat vom Quai d'Orsay: «Der Krieg? Ich kann das nicht so schrecklich finden! Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!»" ("To which a Quai d'Orsay diplomat replies: «The war? I can't find it so terrible! The death of one man: that is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: that is a statistic!»")
Another possible source or intermediary may be the concluding words of chapter 8 of the 1956 novel The Black Obelisk by Erich Maria Remarque: "Aber das ist wohl so, weil ein einzelner immer der Tod ist — und zwei Millionen immer nur eine Statistik." ("But probably the reason is that one dead man is death—and two million are only a statistic." 1958 Crest Book reprint)
Mary Soames (daughter of Churchill) claims to have overheard Stalin deliver a variant of the quote in immediate postwar Berlin (Remembrance Sunday Andrew Marr interview BBC 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hP2tpw9XEw
See also Jean Rostand, Thoughts of a Biologist, 1939: "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god."
In an interview given for the 1983 three-part documentary Der Prozeß by Norddeutscher Rundfunk on the Third Majdanek trial, Simon Wiesenthal attributes the quote to the unpublished auto-biography of Adolf Eichmann. According to Wiesenthal, Eichmann had been asked by another member of the Reich Main Security Office during WWII what they should answer would they be questioned after the war about the millions of dead Jews they were responsible for, to which Eichmann according to his own testimony had replied with the quote.
Misattributed
Variant: The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.
Variant: Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside while still alive. Never surrender.
"The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture", Life Magazine (December 1988)
Interviews
“If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life”
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Variant: That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Source: The Nameless City
“Someday death will take us to another star.”
“I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death”
N.Y. State of Mind
On Albums, Illmatic (1994)
“The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.”
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
“An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.”
As quoted in Familiar Medical Quotations (1968) by Maurice B. Strauss
The Ten Trusts (2003), p. xv
“To the angel of death, we are all like chess pieces on the chessboard.”
Dated 27 March 1942
Diary excerpts
As quoted by Else Gebel, in letter to Robert Scholl (November, 1946). Original German text. http://www.mythoselser.de/texts/scholl-gebel.htm
Variant: Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Source: Julius Caesar
History and Utopia (1960)
Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter One
The Last Messiah [Den sidste Messias] (1933)
“Trapped in life, only escape I know is death.”
"Hidden"
Man's Greatest Achievement (1908; 1930)
Context: According to an adopted theory, every ponderable atom is differentiated from a tenuous fluid, filling all space merely by spinning motion, as a whirl of water in a calm lake. By being set in movement this fluid, the ether, becomes gross matter. Its movement arrested, the primary substance reverts to its normal state. It appears, then, possible for man through harnessed energy of the medium and suitable agencies for starting and stopping ether whirls to cause matter to form and disappear. At his command, almost without effort on his part, old worlds would vanish and new ones would spring into being. He could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, adjust its distance from the sun, guide it on its eternal journey along any path he might choose, through the depths of the universe. He could make planets collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light; he could originate life in all its infinite forms. To cause at will the birth and death of matter would be man's grandest deed, which would give him the mastery of physical creation, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny.
Source: Utopia (1516), Ch. 1 : Discourses of Raphael Hythloday, of the Best State of a Commonwealth
Context: I think putting thieves to death is not lawful; and it is plain and obvious that it is absurd and of ill consequence to the commonwealth that a thief and a murderer should be equally punished; for if a robber sees that his danger is the same if he is convicted of theft as if he were guilty of murder, this will naturally incite him to kill the person whom otherwise he would only have robbed; since, if the punishment is the same, there is more security, and less danger of discovery, when he that can best make it is put out of the way; so that terrifying thieves too much provokes them to cruelty.
“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”
Source: Wuthering Heights
Context: I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him.
“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”
“Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.”
“We're reaching for death
on the end of a candle
We're trying for something
that's already found us”
“The death of one is a tragedy, but death of a million is just a statistic.”
Being from Manson's Fight Song of Holy Wood, this is actually a quote from German writer Erich Maria Remarque, also often misattributed to Josef Stalin.
Misattributed
“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
Laila, p. 395
Variant: Every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)
6.4311
Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt. Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Variant: Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.
5 April 1944
The Diary of a Young Girl (1942 - 1944)
Variant: I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met.
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies within us while we live.”
Quoted in History of Sikh Struggles (1989) by Gurmit Singh, p. 189.
To Leon Goldensohn (14 June 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
Eliphas Levi
Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter XIII
“There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.”
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
29a–b
Alternate translation: "To fear death, is nothing else but to believe ourselves to be wise, when we are not; and to fancy that we know what we do not know. In effect, no body knows death; no body can tell, but it may be the greatest benefit of mankind; and yet men are afraid of it, as if they knew certainly that it were the greatest of evils."
Plato, Apology
"Neighborhood Sniper", 5150: Home 4 tha Sick (1992).
1990s
After the announcement of the death sentence.
Source: Bartłomiej Kuraś, Witold Pilecki – w Auschwitzu z własnej woli, „Ale Historia”, w: „Gazeta Wyborcza”, 22 kwietnia 2013.
Excerpt from My Life by Oswald Mosley (1968), Ch.16.
From 1999 interview.
Noted in the October 2003 BBC News profile of Ebadi. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3181992.stm (retrieved Oct. 15, 2008)
“Death lurks in the farewell of a true friend.”
La mort est dans l'adieu d'un ami veritable.
Elégies (1830), Au Sommeil; translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 110.
Stobaeus, iv. 29a. 19
Quoted by Stobaeus
Prelude, Stanza 1.
Departmental Ditties and other Verses (1886)
Grigory Rasputin in a letter to the Tsarina Alexandra, 7 Dec 1916
Quoted in: Yanqing Vanessa Ong et al. Memories unfolded: a guide to memories at Old Ford Factory, 2008, p. 50
Quoted regarding his advisor.Few men in history would be so frank and honest with their monarch and when Weizheng died, Taizong was overwhelmed with grief. The Emperor said to his ministers,
Responding http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiyezo1fLRs to Senator José Agripino Maia - former member of ARENA, ruling party of the military dictatorship - in a Senate hearing, May 7. He suggested that, for having lied when she was interrogated by the political police, she could also have been lying about the leak of data of Fernando Henrique Cardoso's personal expenditures.
2008
Interview (March/April 1972), as quoted in The Leading Men of MGM (2006) by Jane Ellen Wayne, p. 406
Context: The first time that I appeared on stage, it scared me to death. I really didn't know what all the yelling was about. I didn't realize that my body was moving. It's a natural thing to me. So to the manager backstage I said, "What'd I do? What'd I do?" And he said, "Whatever it is, go back and do it again."
“The only one who's always punctual is Death”
Act I
Romanoff and Juliet (1956)
Context: The only one who's always punctual is Death … whatever the time he always strikes his knell at the first streak of dawn … and believe me, he knows what he's doing. How I hate the dawn! It's the hour of the firing squad. The last glass of brandy. The ultimate cigarette. The final wish. All the hideously calculated hypocrisy of men when they commit a murder in the name of justice. Then it's the time of death on a grander scale, the hour of the great offenses … fix your bayonets boys …gentlemen, synchronize your watches … in ten seconds time the barrage starts … a thousand men are destined to die in order to capture a farmhouse no one has lived in for years... And finally dawn is the herald of the day, our twelve hours of unimportance, when we have to cede to the pressures of the powers, smile at people we have every reason but expediency to detest … A diplomat these days is nothing but a head-waiter who's allowed to sit down occasionally.
Disputed
Original: (la) Qui se ultro morti offerant facilius reperiuntur quam qui dolorem patienter ferant.
Quoted in many works without citation
Se, depois de eu morrer, quiserem escrever a minha biografia,
Não há nada mais simples.
Tem só duas datas—a da minha nascença e a da minha morte.
Entre uma e outra coisa todos os dias são meus.
Alberto Caeiro (heteronym), "Se, depois de eu morrer" (8 November 1915), trans. Jonathan Griffin.
Source: Poems of Fernando Pessoa
“The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.”
Meditations. iv. 17.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Diary of a Drug Fiend
“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo
“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual”