Top 100 Quotes About Epitaph
#2. At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly.
Brian Eno
#3. Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene:
"Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please"
This also became Conrad's epitaph.
Joseph Conrad
#4. One shouldn't write one's own epitaph. I hope people will remember me as one who did her best - and who wasn't an anachronism.
Margrethe II Of Denmark
#5. EPITAPH OF JALALUDIN RUMI
When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.
Idries Shah
#6. Would you like me to [kill you] now?" asked Snape, his voice heavy with irony. "Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?
J.K. Rowling
#7. As soon seek roses in December, ice in June,
Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff
Believe a woman or an epitaph
Or any other thing that's false
Before you trust in critics.
George Gordon Byron
#8. I'm sorry. You went too far.'
Lovely. What an epitaph.
Joanne Harris
#9. I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth.
Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.
[Epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died]
Johannes Kepler
#10. Live so that when the final summons comes you will leave something more behind you than an epitaph on a tombstone or an obituary in a newspaper.
Billy Sunday
#11. If there's no sea-gull there's no meeting, Wicklow had said. No sea-gull means abort. That's my epitaph, thought Barley. 'There was no sea-gull, so he aborted.
John Le Carre
#13. And she's certainly a good cook." Miss Betts sighed. "The epitaph of the spinster.
Annie Barrows
#14. Gun-wielding recluse gunned down by local police" isn't the epitaph I want. I am hoping for "Witnesses reported the sound up to two hundred kilometers away" or "Last body part finally located".
James Nicoll
#15. Once someone asked me, "What do you want to be your epitaph?" So I said, "Paulo Coelho died when he was alive.
Paulo Coelho
#16. I have only one ambition left: I should like to have a good epitaph.
Otto Von Bismarck
#17. One of the lines from my books is about having respect for different minds, and if I had to have an epitaph at this point in my life, that would be it.
Daniel Tammet
#18. Of the many million pairs of grieving parents, we will never know how many felt that their sons had died for something noble, and how many felt what one British couple expressed in the epitaph they placed on their son's tombstone at Gallipoli: 'What harm did he do Thee, O Lord?
Adam Hochschild
#19. I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]
Johannes Kepler
#20. This is the epitaph I want on my tomb: Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the earth.
Benito Mussolini
#21. I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything should just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'.
Andy Warhol
#22. We don't want any - " he began, and ought to have chosen his words better, because they were his epitaph. It
Terry Pratchett
#23. [Suggesting an epitaph for herself:] This is on me.
Dorothy Parker
#24. There occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this:
He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute.
P.G. Wodehouse
#25. Why waste a life in search of an epitaph? 'Fondly Remembered'. Who other than a halfwit has that chiselled above his head?
Michael Dobbs
#26. Any wave of the ocean could be my epitaph.
Marty Rubin
#28. I would like to think that Ive left the world of cardiovascular surgery better than when I found it. That would be a suitable epitaph.
C. Walton Lillehei
#29. Either our history shall with full mouth
Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave,
Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,
Not worshipped with a waxen epitaph.
William Shakespeare
#30. I pledge no fudge of compromise', said Arthur Scargill, 'and no carrots of redundancy'. That would make a nice epitaph for him. 'He pledged no fudge'.
Tony Benn
#31. I wonder how many of our tombstones will have to be inscribed with the epitaph 'Died of too many meetings'?
Hannah Whitall Smith
#32. Write to me your most perfect epitaph, or I shall compare a poet to a lecturer. Thou art more Spartan than a ballad monger who makes his living as a Wal-Mart greeter;
Scott Jonathan Nixon
#33. Lest when I am gone you may be at a loss for an epitaph for me, let me give you one - He Fed Fevers.
Robert James Graves
#34. Our generation does not want its epitaph to read, 'We kept charity overhead low.' We want it to read that we changed the world.
Dan Pallotta
#35. Every man at time of Death,
Would fain set forth some saying that may live
After his death and better humankind;
For death gives life's last word a power to live,
And, lie the stone-cut epitaph, remain
After the vanished voice, and speak to men.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#36. His epitaph: Who, by vigor of mind almost divine, the motions and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, and the tides of the seas first demonstrated.
Isaac Newton
#37. A journalist once asked me what I would like my epitaph to be and I said I think I would like it to be 'He did very little harm'. And that's not easy. Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be remembered as having done very little, that would suit me.
Paul Eddington
#38. For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.
Pericles
#39. Coelorum perrupit claustra.
He broke through the barriers of the skies.
[Herschel's epitaph]
William Herschel
#40. When I die, my epitaph should read: She Paid the Bills. That's the story of my private life.
Gloria Swanson
#41. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
William Shakespeare
#42. If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.
Jane Campion
#44. I picture my epitaph: 'Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.
Paul Newman
#45. He remembered the gravestone of a woman parishioner in the churchyard of St. John's in the Grove. DEMURE AT LAST, it read. He thought that the single most definitive and amusing epitaph he'd ever come across.
Jan Karon
#46. To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.
Roger Zelazny
#47. All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.
Bertrand Russell
#48. Curiosity never killed this cat' - that's what I'd like as my epitaph
Studs Terkel
#49. A few years ago, I actually did come up with a mocking sort of epitaph for myself. It's this: 'Here lies Robert Silverberg. He spent most of his life in the future. Now he's in the past.'
Robert Silverberg
#50. Samson had his Delilah, Adam his Eve, and the Jazter had you.
Already, I can see my epitaph. Here lies Jaz, lover of his fellow men, done in royally by one of them.
Manil Suri
#51. Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have already written an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person that they will not betray to stay alive.
Sidney Hook
#52. I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: 'Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the
downtrodden of every race and language and color.'
Thaddeus Stevens
#53. Lots of people can have girlfriends. But I can throw around guitars onstage! That'll be my epitaph: 'He never had a girlfriend, but you should've seen him smash a Les Paul!'
Trent Reznor
#54. I knew that I shouldn't have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.
Michael Chabon
#55. Which epitaph would you choose for your grave-stone: "He made lots of money." or "He saved the Earth"? And don't think I'm being sarcastic, because for once, I'm not. We're all going to die. What will be your legacy? Smaug-loads of money? or Saving the Earth? It's your choice.
Steve Bivans
#56. The epitaph that I would write for history would say: I conceal nothing. It is not enough not to lie. One should strive not to lie in a negative sense by remaining silent.
Leo Tolstoy
#57. I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave.
Alan Arkin
#58. On the stone that remains carved next to his name, his epitaph plain, only a pawn in their game.
Bob Dylan
#60. Augie: Does everybody else know?
T.C.: About my epitaph?
Augie: About me being gay, you gink-head hoser-face!
T.C. Not everybody. There's a night watchman at a Dunkin Donuts just outside of Detroit. He doesn't know yet.
Steve Kluger
#61. I got dizzy," he explained.
I should think you did. What were you doing?'
Nothing," said Moon. "I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over."
Let that be my epitaph.
Tom Stoppard
#63. Can't' will be the epitaph of the British Empire - unless we wake up in time.
Oswald Mosley
#64. would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in. Let that be my epitaph. ***
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#65. You with your veins full of night - you have no more place among men than an epitaph in the middle of a circus.
Emil M. Cioran
#66. She'll take my breath, she'll take my bones, but she cannot have my epitaph. For if indeed I truly am a writer, then e'er my words shall dance upon my grave.
Anne Schilde
#67. As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.
Mary Roach
#68. [Requesting her epitaph to read this way:] Excuse my dust.
Dorothy Parker
#69. Actually not bad at all. Tastes minty, very refreshing."
"A worthy epitaph," said Jean
Scott Lynch
#70. Let there be no inscription upon my tomb; let no man write my epitaph: no man can write my epitaph.
Robert Emmet
#71. No one gets out of this life alive.
So leave a footprint of your choice.
You are writing your epitaph.
You are writing it now!
Life is a process, not a goal.
Live it now, or you will miss it!
We have time to spend and no time to waste.
Charles Franklin
#72. Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.
Cyril Connolly
#73. Si monumentum requiris circumspice
(If you seek his monument, look around.)
[Epitaph on Wren's tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral]
Christopher Wren
#74. I haven't written my own epitaph, and I'm not sure I should. Whatever it is, I hope it will be simple, and that it will point people not to me, but to the One I served.
Billy Graham
#75. Epitaph
"love had ten thousand flowers
Bloomed on those cheeks, like an angel you came
as haste to earth and
Opened the joys breast until the sun's has faded,
fatigued with self-heat of burden
Left the world to keep the loads to the enchanting night
Nithin Purple
#76. Queen Jane Seymour's epitaph, inscribed in Latin, translated roughly to:
Here lies Jane, a phoenix
Who died in giving another phoenix birth,
Let her be mourned, for birds like these
Are rare indeed.
Leslie Carroll
#77. He also told me he'd just written the epitaph for his tomb: LO PEOR YA PASO. PEOR HUMILLACION QUE LA DE EXISTIR NO HAY.
THE WORST IS BEHIND. THERE IS NO HUMILIATION WORSE THAN EXISTENCE
Nicanor Parra
#78. I wish to have as my epitaph: 'Here lies a man who was wise enough to bring into his service men who knew more than he.'
Andrew Carnegie
#79. Someone once asked me what I want on my epitaph when I pass away. Just the words 'I tried.' That's what this game of life is all about. Trying. There's the tryers, the criers, and the liars.
Mickey Rooney
#80. Models of style: the swearword, the telegram, the epitaph.
Cioran
#81. My Own Epitaph
Life's a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, and now I know it.
John Gay
#82. Although it is undoubtedly true man was created by God;
it is just as true that man was "made" by Satan."
The Milkweed Prophesy; Epitaph of the Apocalypse
Milkweed L. Augustine
#83. Cursing my heels and debating whether it was faster to stop and take them off
damn ankle straps!
or keep running with the potential neck breakers. Wouldn't that make a charming epitaph? Here lies Cat. Killed not by fang, but Ferragamos.
Jeaniene Frost
#84. It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.
Alan Alda
#85. Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, i remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the grand canyon for the flying-saucer people to find was this:
WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT,
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP.
only he didn't say doggone.
Kurt Vonnegut
#86. All things considered, the happiest epitaph to have etched on one's headstone is this: 'He never knew what hit him'.
Thomas Ligotti
#87. I tried and failed. I tried again and again and succeeded.
[Epitaph from Gail Borden's gravestone.]
Gail Borden
#88. [Suggesting her epitaph:] This is too deep for me.
Hedy Lamarr
#89. Over the epitaph of this generation it will say ENTERTAINED TO DEATH.
Paul Washer
#90. I didn't want my epitaph to read 'Here lies John Caudwell, billionaire.' I knew that wasn't enough. I've had a charitable instinct all my life, but working gave me no time for it.
John Caudwell
#91. The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: 'If you seek his monument, look around.'
Ludwig Von Mises
#92. He [Harpo] loved life and lived it joyously and deeply and that's about as good an epitaph as anyone can have.
Groucho Marx
#93. She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.
Anna Funder
#94. Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.
Charles Stross
#95. Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
T. S. Eliot
#96. Every day is Sunday" - that wouldn't make a bad epitaph, would it?
Julian Barnes
#97. I tried to make sense of things. Now that I think about it, I have always tried. It could be my epitaph. LEO GURSKY: HE TRIED TO MAKE SENSE.
Nicole Krauss
#98. No fear. A fitting epitaph, more curse than blessing, the truth of their very existence.
Cindy Skaggs
#99. What a measly epitaph that would make: 'They saw it coming, but hadn't the wit to stop it happening.'
Sara Parkin
#100. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time.
George Sutherland
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