Deathbed Quotes

“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."
(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)”
― Voltaire

“Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.

(Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.)

[Said on his deathbed]”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“Almost universally, when people look back on their lives while on their deathbed [...] they wish they had spent more time with the people and activities they truly loved and less time worrying about aspects of life that, upon deeper examination, really don't matter at all that much. Imagining yourself at your own funeral allows you to look back at your life while you still have the chance to make some important changes.”
― Richard Carlson, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff ... and It's All Small Stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things From Taking Over Your Life

“What would I have wanted to say if I had had the opportunity to see him one more time? I would like to think that I would have kept it simple and said, “I love you,” then just held his hand in silence, letting that thought linger in the space of the time we had left together.”
― Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent

“Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things—either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.”
― Socrates, Apology, Crito And Phaedo Of Socrates.

“I shall stay here as long as I may, I don't want to think — I needn't think. I don't care for anything but you, and that's enough for the present. It will last a little yet. Here on my knees, with you dying in my arms, I'm happier than I've been for a long time. And I want you to be happy — not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“If I’m happy because of something -even if that thing persists- my happiness in time vanishes. But if I regret something or become sad about something that sadness or regret can follow me for many years, maybe even to my deathbed.”
― Cave Man, Modern Human's Handbook

“For, in those centuries, when numbers of children died in the cradle and half the women in childbirth, when epidemics ravaged adult life, when wounds were but rarely cured, and sores did not heal, when the Church’s teaching was ceaselessly directed towards a consciousness of sin, when the statues in the sanctuaries showed worms gnawing at corpses, when each one carried throughout his life the spectre of his own decomposition before his eyes and the idea of death was habitual, natural and familiar, to be present at a man’s last breath was not, as it is for us, a tragic reminder of our common destiny.”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“As the tide of life recedes,
and the crest of foam scatters to the wind,
all that's left on the sand
are dying bubbles of dreams and wishes...”
― Vijay Fafat, The Ninth Pawn of White - A Book of Unwritten Verses

“How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?”
― John Keats

“I then invited the mother of the handicapped son to imagine herself similarly looking back over her life. Let us listen to what she had to say as recorded on the tape: “I wished to have children and this wish has been granted to me; one boy died; the other, however, the crippled one, would have been sent to an institution if I had not taken over his care. Though he is crippled and helpless, he is after all my boy. And so I have made a fuller life possible for him; I have made a better human being out of my son.” At this moment, there was an outburst of tears and, crying, she continued: “As for myself, I can look back peacefully on my life; for I can say my life is full of meaning, and I have tried hard to fulfill it; I have done my best - I have done the best for my son. My life was no failure!” Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, meaning which even included all of her sufferings. By the same token, however, it has become clear as well that a life of short duration, like that, for example, of her dead boy, could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“She wished to say everything; she was afraid he might die before she had done so.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“At the end, life will hold us responsible for all the blessings that we refused to acknowledge.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware that this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, and there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son, and yes, your ex-wife, and you have loved the pretty girl, you have loved beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“God preserve me from growing wise! Yes, I intend to mumble toothlessly to my deathbed bystanders: God preserve me from growing wise!”
― Knut Hamsun, The Wanderer

“Obitus vitae otium est (Death is life's rest).”
― Ernst Jünger, A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945

“Before I continue, I just want to write about living every day like your last one. I don’t agree with it at all. You will die one day but you will live thousands of days. So, living your thousands of days according to just one, seems like a bad idea to me.”
― Cave Man, Modern Human's Handbook

“It’s okay to complain
It doesn’t weaken you
It softens you first around the mouth then the eyes
That first breath is a thank you
without airs
You’ll swallow and it’ll go into your belly
And your hands will clasp your throat but it’ll be too late
because once it hits the blood your heart will have it and it’s okay there
Mortally you will feel how it is to be whole and in ruins

There you are

Scream
Roll in the aisles
Cry
Another breath
Breeeeeeeeeeeeeathe

And complain again
you human
Your wildness will die before you and it does not need permission to leave or forgiveness for leaving

This is how you let us know you don’t want to be here any more than we want you here”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“Imagine getting to the end of your life and realizing you never really started.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“I love you. I loved you from the first moment.' Bubbles of blood formed at the corners of his mouth. His gaze drifted past me, to the night sky. Then it dragged back to me- the movement slow, laborious, like he was working very hard to make sure I was the last thing he saw. 'So many mistakes in the end,' he choked out. 'Never you.”
― Carissa Broadbent, The Serpent and the Wings of Night

“No human on his deathbed ever regretted having spent too much time with his children ❤️”
― George Stamatis

“A moment later the music began, and Kate shrank beneath the onslaught of its message: the fury of hope and joy that towered in the notes, outburning the sunlight and outpouring the volumes of the sea. All that was bold and noble and happy in created sound burst from the metempirical quills, and it was a blasphemy not to rejoice.

Christian died in its midst, purposeful and successful; the last struggle unseen by anyone but Kate, and laying no bridle on the living.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“From childbirth to our deathbeds, we seek to impose our will upon the external environment. At each milepost in life, we seek to expand our state of conscious awareness.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“What then, had I discovered? That there is nobody so duplicitous as oneself? That certainty is nothing but unreasonable belief? That there can be no answer to death? That there should be no answer to it, at least not for the living? That we have in all of us, written into our very matter, an unpassable divide; and if there is a bridge between this world and the next, then surely there is only one toll to pay.”
― A.J.West, The Spirit Engineer

“The rattle snakes its way down into my lungs when I take my last breath.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Every time I looked toward a horizon of wondered if I should just walk and walk and never look back, I'd hear the promise I made eleven years ago as she wasted away on her deathbed. Stay together, and look after them. I'd agreed, too young to ask why she hadn't begged my elder sisters, or my father.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“Mâini bătătorite de sapă, de munci grele, mâini care luaseră pe încetul înfățișarea și culoarea pământului uscat și crăpat. Acum, reci, se odihnesc: nu se vor mai clinti niciodată... Acolo, în țărână, peste ani de zile, când vor rămâne numai un schelet deșirat, oasele mâinilor au să se mai odihnească încă, pe gratiile coastelor, împreunate, neclintite, așa cum niciodată nu s-au odihnit.”
― Cezar Petrescu, Întunecare vol. 1

“daydreaming
fondly of
deathbed love.
love that stays,
at all costs.”
― Christopher Poindexter

“Nobody will be with me when I die. Nobody will touch me, stare at me or press their hot and living fingers on my cooling lids. They won’t hiss and whisper by my deathbed and force the last bitter drops between my teeth.”
― Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

“This will be the sort of sex you think about on your deathbed, the kind you tell your grandchildren about—but don't ever do that, even if you turn senile.”
― Valentine Glass, Jarring Sex