» The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
» I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it. [About a politician who had recently died]
» Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.
» The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
» All say, How hard it is that we have to die -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
» Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
» Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
» We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.
» We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.
» Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.