Death.
It’s something we rarely talk about. Or want to think about.
But it’s also an important part of life and there are many timeless words of wisdom about it that can help shift something deep inside of us.
So in today’s post I want to share 101 of the most thought provoking and powerful quotes about death.
I hope you’ll find something here to help you with the meaning of your own life, with grief when you have lost a loved one and simply to make a bit more sense of something that can be hard to understand.
Death Quotes That Will Make You Think Differently About Life
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
– Marcus Aurelius
“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
– Emily Dickinson
“It is not length of life, but depth of life.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Whatever you want to do, do it now. There are only so many tomorrows.”
– Michael Landon
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
– Mark Twain
“Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
– Steve Jobs
“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
– Chuck Palahniuk
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
– Haruki Murakami
“A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.”
– Lao Tzu
“People living deeply have no fear of death.”
– Anaïs Nin
“He who is not busy being born is busy dying.”
– Bob Dylan
“By becoming deeply aware of our mortality, we intensify our experience of every aspect of life.”
– Robert Greene
“Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
– William Saroyan
“Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
“He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.”
– Montaigne
“I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.”
– Corazon Aquino
“Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.”
– Henry Van Dyke
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
– Steve Jobs
“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”
– Albert Camus
“I’m the one that’s got to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”
– Jimi Hendrix
Short and Powerful Quotes About Death
“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
– Mitch Albom
“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
– François Rabelais
“Death twitches my ear. ‘Live,’ he says. ‘I am coming.’”
– Virgil
“Death pays all debts.”
– William Shakespeare
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
– Franz Kafka
“Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.”
– E. E. Cummings
“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”
– Katharine Hepburn
“Death takes no bribes.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“The idea is to die young as late as possible.”
– Ashley Montagu
“Every exit is an entry somewhere else.”
– Tom Stoppard
“I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.”
– Willa Cather
“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
– Victor Hugo
“Death makes equal the high and low.”
– John Heywood
“Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.”
– Albert Camus
“No art is possible without a dance with death.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Death is just infinity closing in.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
“Even death has a heart.”
– Markus Zusak
“Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”
– Walt Whitman
“I don’t want to die without any scars.”
– Chuck Palahniuk
“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”
– Janet Fitch
Death Quotes That Will Help You With Loss
“Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
“What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”
– Helen Keller
“Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other.”
– Leo Buscaglia
“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
– Lemony Snicket
“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.”
– Rumi
“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”
– George Eliot
“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
– Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
“We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.”
– Germaine de Staël
“That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it’s reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.”
– Sarah Dessen
“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?”
– Jodi Picoult
“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”
– Madeline Miller
“They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”
– Banksy
“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
– Cicero
“People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn’t. It continues and is ever-changing.”
– Jandy Nelson
“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
“When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time.”
– Laurie Halse Anderson
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
– Isaac Asimov
“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
“Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion to death.”
– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies.”
– William Penn
Meaningful Quotes on Death That Hit Differently
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”
– Hunter S. Thompson
“Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?”
– Epicurus
“It is the fate – the genetic and neural fate – of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”
– Oliver Sacks
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
– Mark Twain
“It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.”
– Samuel Johnson
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace.”
– Oscar Wilde
“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
“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 one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.”
– Terry Pratchett
“Death is nothing, but to live defeated is to die every day.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
“The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.”
– Albert Einstein
“For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”
– Kahlil Gibran
“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
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.”
– Terry Pratchett
“Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.”
– Wallace Stevens
“Man always thinks about the past before he dies, as if he were frantically searching for proof that he truly lived.”
– Jet Black
“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 Hemingway
“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
“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
“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
Death Quotes That Will Give You Relief and Help You Heal
“Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.”
– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“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
“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”
– Rabindranath Tagore
“The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.”
– Thornton Wilder
“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
“There is no death. Only a change of worlds.”
– Chief Seattle
“Die happily and look forward to taking up a new and better form. Like the sun, only when you set in the west can you rise in the east.”
– Rumi
“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.”
– Leonardo da Vinci
“Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.”
– Rabindranath Tagore
“I discovered to my joy, that it is life, not death, that has no limits.”
– Gabriel García Márquez
“Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.”
– Helen Keller
“You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”
– Philip Pullman
“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
– J.K. Rowling
“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.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
“Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.”
– Richard Bach
“Death is nothing else but going home to God, the bond of love will be unbroken for all eternity.”
– Mother Teresa
“Endings are not always bad. Most times they’re just beginnings in disguise.”
– Kim Harrison
“Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.”
– Jean de La Fontaine
“Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.”
– Buddha
Want more timeless and thought provoking inspiration? Then have a look at these best words of wisdom ever, the quotes about reading here and also this one with deep and meaningful quotes about life.