The quote database

Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a reproach; they honour him for silent lessons; they cherish his example; and in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the dead.

The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears; and to all these, the consideration of mortality is a certain and adequate remedy.

Even grief, that passion to which the virtuous and tender mind is particularly subject, will be obviated or alleviated by the same thoughts.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away.

An habitual sadness seizes upon the soul, and the faculties are chained to a single object, which can never be contemplated but with hopeless uneasiness.

Native deformity cannot be rectified, a dead friend cannot return, and the hours of youth trifled away in folly, or lost in sickness, cannot be restored.

Parents we can have but once; and he promises himself too much, who enters life with the expectation of finding many friends.

Many friendships are formed by a community of sensual pleasures: all these will be cut off.

This it must be; and there is no means of escaping from tribulation and sorrow, except to bear them patiently.

One temptation or sorrow passeth, and another cometh; and always we shall have somewhat to suffer

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.

Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.

Why may I not rest me from this restlessness and sleep from this wide waking?

Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing--a childless mother.

No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul.

The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.

It is the pang of parting, the unloosing our grasp, the breaking asunder some strong tie, the leaving some cherished purpose unfulfilled, that creates the repugnance to go

There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern--why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.

Even in the same family the gap is not so great; the wound closes up sooner than we should expect.