Quotes About Death

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

— Joseph Stalin

I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.

— Clarence Darrow

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

— H. L. Mencken

Death is the greatest evil, because it cuts off hope.

— William Hazlitt

I shall never act differently, even if I have to die for it many times.

— Socrates

If I could drop dead right now, I’d be the happiest man alive.

— Samuel Goldwyn

I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?

— Job 14:10

When good men die, their goodness does not perish.

— Euripides

May my last breath be drawn through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.

— Charles Lamb

The general outlook is not that the person has died but that the person has lived.

— William Buchanan, on writing obituaries

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

— W. H. Auden

It is a disturbing truth that even undertakers die sometimes.

— Arnold Bennett

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

— John Donne

It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

— Woody Allen

If my doctor told me I only had six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood.  I’d type a little faster.

— Isaac Asimov

I am ready to meet my Maker.  Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

— Winston Churchill

Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up.  I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something.  Anything except sticking me in a goddamn cemetery.  People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday and all that crap.  Who wants flowers when you’re dead?  Nobody.

— J. D. Salinger

Eternity is a terrible thought.  I mean, when’s it going to end?

— Tom Stoppard

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.

— Benjamin Franklin

Death is swallowed up in victory.  O death, where is thy sting?  O grave, where is thy victory?

— 1 Corinthians 15:54-55

Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.  For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

— John Donne

Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoke of the soul.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I have a rendezvous with Death at some disputed barricade.

— Alan Seeger

It’s a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing.

— Andrew Young

Death is the price of revolution.

— H. Rap Brown

We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.

— Angela Davis

If you’re afraid to die, you will not be able to live.

— James Baldwin

The present life is naught but a diversion and a sport; surely the Last Abode is Life, did they but know?

— Koran 19:64

Death is just a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees.

— J. J. Furnas

I hope to see my Pilot face to face when I have crost the bar.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Adam, the first great benefactor of our race.  He brought death into the world.

— Mark Twain

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

— James M. Barrie

It hath been often said that it is not death but dying which is terrible.

— Henry Fielding

If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.

— Lytton Strachey (attrib.)

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child.  Things never get back to the way they were.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the death of his first son

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

— Mark Twain

Why fear death?  It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

— Charles Frohman, supposedly said as he was dying in the torpedoing of SS Lusitania

How can they tell?

— Dorothy Parker, on being informed of the death of President Calvin Coolidge

His death was the first time that Ed Wynn ever made anyone sad.

— Red Skelton

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

— Burial service, The Book of Common Prayer

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Quotes About Beauty

Men ought to be more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight.

— Germaine Greer

I don’t like standard beauty.  There is no beauty without strangeness.

— Karl Lagerfeld

How you lose or keep your hair depends on how wisely you choose your parents.

— Edward R. Nida

Ah seen a man so ugly till they spread a sheet over his head at night so sleep could slip up on him.

— Zora Neale Hurston

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.

— Marguerite, Countess of Blessington

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

— John Donne

She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.

— Lord Byron

What he hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.

— William Shakespeare

Beauty: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

— Ambrose Bierce

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

— Oscar Wilde

My wife was too beautiful for words, but not for arguments.

— John Barrymore

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty...but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

— Francis Bacon

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

— John Keats

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

— Leo Tolstoy

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.

— John Ruskin

Ask a toad what is beauty...He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly, and a brown back.

— Voltaire

A much more effective and lasting method of face-lifting than surgical technique is happy thinking, new interests, and outdoor exercise.

— Sara Murray Jordan

I always say beauty is only sin deep.

— Saki (H. H. Munro)

I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough.  What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

— Jean Kerr

Anatomically speaking, a bust is here today and gone tomorrow.

— Isabel Barnett

Beauty’s but skin deep.

— John Davis of Hereford

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

— Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

None but the brave deserves the fair.

— John Dryden

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Quotes About Age and Aging

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

— Oscar Wilde

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice — that is until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say “I lost it.”

— Sydney J. Harris

When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange — my youth.

— Sara Teasdale

He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.

— Margaret Halsey

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.

— Victor Hugo

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age [thirty-five], he had already been dead for a year.

— Tom Lehrer

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us — something more than we could learn ourselves, from a book.

— Cyril Connolly

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

— Muhammad Ali

The greatest thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.

— Madeleine L’Engle

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

— Don Marquis

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

— Herbert Gold

Do not go gentle into that good night.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

— Dylan Thomas

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

— Tom Stoppard

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

— Gore Vidal

When I grow up, I want to be a little boy.

— Joseph Heller

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; at forty, the judgment.

— Benjamin Franklin

I refuse to admit that I am more than fifty-two, even if that does make my sons illegitimate.

— Nancy Astor (attrib.)

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age.  A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.

— Oscar Wilde

Thirty-five is a very attractive age.  London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

— Oscar Wilde

Middle age: when you begin to exchange your emotions for symptoms.

— Irvin Cobb

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

— Elbert Hubbard

A woman is as old as she looks before breakfast.

— Edgar Watson Howe

Discussing how old you are is the temple of boredom.

— Ruth Gordon

Anyone can get old.  All you have to do is live long enough.

— Groucho Marx

My only fear is that I may live too long.

— Thomas Jefferson

All would live long, but none would be old.

— Benjamin Franklin

 ‘Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.

— Lord Byron

I have been asked, “How do you grow old so easily?” I reply, “Very easily. I give all my time to it.”

— Emanuel Celler

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence.

— Art Linkletter

Our nation’s long neglect of minorities whose skin is dark is perhaps only a little worse than our neglect of another minority whose hair is white.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

When you are about thirty-five years old, something terrible always happens to music.

— Steve Race

What he hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.

— William Shakespeare

Children are a great comfort in your old age — and they help you to reach it faster, too.

— Lionel M. Kauffman

The secret to a long life is to stay busy, get plenty of exercise, and don’t drink too much.  Then again don’t drink too little.

— Hermann Smith-Johannson, at age 103

I don’t care how old you get, I think a woman ought to stay sexy for her husband.

— Tammy Faye Bakker

Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics.  Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.

— George Jean Nathan

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it’s such a nice change from being young.

— Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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Quotes About Pleasure

Pleasure is like a cordial — a little bit of it is not injurious, but too much destroys.

— Marguerite, Countess of Blessington

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

— Walter Bagehot

Pleasure is frail like a dewdrop, while it laughs it dies.

— Rabindranath Tagore

The rule of my life is to make business a pleasure, and pleasure my business.

— Aaron Burr

The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

The rapturous, wild, and ineffable pleasure of drinking at someone else’s expense.

— Henry Sambrooke Leigh

I’m tired of love; I’m still more tired of rhyme.  But money gives me pleasure all the time.

— Hilaire Belloc

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Quotes About Passion

Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.

— Robert J. Sternberg

Mencius enumerated the three “mature virtues” of his “great man” as “wisdom, compassion, and courage.” I should like to lop off one syllable and regard as the qualities of a great soul passion, wisdom, and courage.

— Lin Yutang

A master passion is the love of news.

— George Crabbe

The ruling passion, be it what it will, the ruling passion conquers reason still.

— Alexander Pope

Passions are vices or virtues in their highest powers.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Quotes About Decision

Soon after a hard decision something inevitably occurs to cast doubt.  Holding steady against that doubt usually proves that decision.

— R. I. Fitzhenry

Be willing to make decisions.  That’s the most important quality in a good leader.  Don’t fall victim to what I call the “ready-aim-aim-aim-aim syndrome.”  You must be willing to fire.

— T. Boone Pickens

Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.

— Gordon Graham

At the last moment there is always a reason not existing before — namely,  the impossibility of further vacillation.

— George Eliot

The man who see both sides of the question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.

— Oscar Wilde

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road.  They get run over.

— Aneurin Bevan

The man who knows when not to act is wise.  To my mind, bravery is forethought.

— Euripides

Equivocation is halfway to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.

— William Penn

If someone tells you he is going to make a “realistic decision,” you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

— Mary McCarthy

He would come in and say he changed his mind — which was a gilded figure of speech, because he didn’t have any.

— Mark Twain

A decision is the action an executive must take when he has information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself.

— Arthur W. Radford

We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.

— Lester B. Pearson

When you do say Yes, say it quickly.  But always take a half hour to say No, so you can understand the other fellow’s side.

— Francis Cardinal Spellman

When a person tells you “I’ll let you know” — you know.

— Olin Miller

Sir Stafford has a brilliant mind until it is made up.

— Margot Asquith (attrib.), regarding Sir Stafford Cripps

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