What is death? To go out like a light, and in a sweet trance to forget ourselves and all the passing phenomena of the day, as we forget the phantoms of a fleeting dream; to form, as in a dream, new connections with God's world; to enter into a more exalted sphere, and to make a new step up man's graduated ascent of creation.—Zschokke.
Heaven gives its favorites early death.—Byron.
Our respect for the dead, when they are just dead, is something wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful still. We show it with black feathers and black horses; we show it with black dresses and black heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow, which spoil half of our beautiful cathedrals. We show it with frightful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the quiet grass; and last, and not least, we show it by permitting ourselves to tell any number of falsehoods we think amiable or credible in the epitaph.—Ruskin.
There are remedies for all things but death.—Carlyle.
We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.—Mme. de Staël.
Too early fitted for a better state.—Dryden.
Death, the dry pedant, spares neither the rose nor the thistle, nor does he forget the solitary blade of grass in the distant waste. He destroys thoroughly and unceasingly. Everywhere we may see how he crushes to dust plants and beasts, men and their works. Even the Egyptian pyramids, that would seem to defy him, are trophies of his power,—monuments of decay, graves of primeval kings.—Heinrich Heine.
There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, but has one vacant chair!—Longfellow.
And though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds, there's a lean fellow beats all conquerors.—Thomas Dekker.
Death is a commingling of eternity with time.—Goethe.