“Once a man's thirty, he's already old,
He is indeed as good as dead.
It's best to kill him right away.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, book Faust

Act II, The Gothic Chamber
Faust, Part 2 (1832)

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe185

German writer, artist, and politician 1749–1832

Forrest Carter (1925–1979) Political speechwriter, politician, novelist, memoirist

Source: The Outlaw Josey Wales

“The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.”

Robert Penn Warren book All the King's Men

All the King's Men (1946)

“He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled.

Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of.”

Richard S. Prather (1921–2007) American writer

Source: Take a Murder, Darling

“Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

Diary entry for the day he died (15 April 1888); from Ecclesiasticus, xxxviii
Matthew Arnold's Notebooks (1902)

“Old Grimes is dead, that good old man
We never shall see more;
He used to wear a long black coat
All buttoned down before.”

Albert Gorton Greene (1802–1868) American judge

Old Grimes, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: Compare: "John Lee is dead, that good old man,— / We ne'er shall see him more; / He used to wear an old drab coat / All buttoned down before", Inscription in Matherne Churchyard, To the memory of John Lee, who died May 21, 1823; "Old Abram Brown is dead and gone,— / You'll never see him more; / He used to wear a long brown coat / That buttoned down before", James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Nursery Rhymes of England, p. 60.