Top 100 Quotes About Tombs
#1. I've just been around too much death today not to wonder why we find it appropriate to organize our festivities in and around the tombs of all these ancient cultures.
Linda Fairstein
#2. Books are yours,
Within whose silent chambers treasure lies
Preserved from age to age; more precious far
Than that accumulated store of gold
And orient gems, which, for a day of need,
The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs.
These hoards of truth you can unlock at will:
William Wordsworth
#4. Egypt! from whose all dateless tombs arose Forgotten Pharaohs from their long repose, And shook within their pyramids to hear A new Cambyses thundering in their ear; While the dark shades of forty ages stood Like startled giants by Nile's famous flood.
Lord Byron
#5. What about King Tut's tomb?" I protested.
"That boy king?" Zia rolled her eyes. "Boring. You should see some of the good tombs.
Rick Riordan
#6. If you want to feel the life and the body of great men who are long gone, go to their tombs or monuments; if you want to understand the real life and the wisdom of great men who are long gone, go to their libraries!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#7. People were looting tombs 5,000 years ago in Egypt as soon as people were buried, but the problem is only getting worse and worse.
Sarah Parcak
#8. A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages.
Marcel Proust
#9. The dead play a very prominent part in the experience of the wanderer abroad. The houses in which they were born, the tombs in which they lie, the localities they made famous by their good or evil deeds, and the works their genius left behind them are necessarily the chief shrines of his pilgrimage.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#11. Alexander, of whom men tell many legends, lived by his own. Achilles must have Patroklos. He might love his Briseis; but Patroklos was the friend till death. At their tombs in Troy, Alexander and Hephaistion had sacrificed together. Wound Patroklos, and Achilles will have your blood.
Mary Renault
#13. For having expressed an opinion, however far-fetched, we straightway become its slave, ready to die defending it, and even ready to believe it. And many continue to be martyrs to causes which have ceased to exist, their crowns rusting upon their heads as tin wreaths rust upon forgotten tombs.
Paul Eldridge
#14. It is almost startling to hear this warning of departed time sounding among the tombs, and telling the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward towards the grave.
Washington Irving
#15. I found in one of the tombs an inscription saying, 'If you touch my tomb, you will be eaten by a crocodile and hippopotamus.' It doesn't mean the hippo will eat you, it means the person really wanted his tomb to be protected.
Zahi Hawass
#16. I laughed, disarmed. "Shopping isn't really my thing. Not when there are bookstores to be plundered and tombs to be explored.
Kate Mulgrew
#17. There have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left. They are the heathen.
Henry David Thoreau
#18. Think about what would happen if Indiana Jones and Google Earth had a love child. I use high-resolution and NASA satellites and look for subtle differences on the surface of the earth that locate buried ancient pyramids and towns and ancient tombs, which we then go and excavate.
Sarah Parcak
#19. Thank God for grace, Ye who weep only! If, as some have done, Ye grope tear-blinded in a desert place And touch but tombs,
look up! Those tears will run Soon in long rivers down the lifted face, And leave the vision clear for stars and sun.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#20. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. (Moby Dick; Chap 7 p36)
Herman Melville
#21. Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away.
John Locke
#22. I archive a lot of my clothes and have them wrapped up and in boxes. I call them 'little tombs' and keep them in a storage space ... I would never get rid of the dress I wore on the night I won my Oscar. When I die, someone can have it, but not a minute before!
Halle Berry
#23. I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter.
John Shelby Spong
#24. Samarkand, with its magnificent mosques, tombs and dazzling ensembles of ceramic tiles, is still one of the world's most awe-inspiring cities.
Stephen Kinzer
#25. Say NO to nuclear bombs otherwise it may take us all to our tombs.
Vinita Kinra
#26. The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
#27. The moonlight covered the tombstones with an ethereal glow, and the statues
above the tombs stood like silent guards waiting for something to happen.
Alan Kinross
#28. Though I was satisfied that I was on the verge of perhaps a magnificent find, probably one of the missing tombs that I had been seeking for many years, I was much puzzled by the smallness of the opening in comparison with those of other royal tombs in the valley.
Howard Carter
#29. Now the Tombs, like the name says, are so horrible that they had to close it down. Today it doesn't exist and people go in the electric chair and all that.
Gregory Corso
#30. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless
J.R.R. Tolkien
#31. ... and to all you other cats and chicks out there, sweet or otherwise, buried deep in wordy tombs, who never yet have walked from off the page, a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers!
Gilbert Sorrentino
#32. Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#33. Broken aqueducts, left in the most picturesque and beautiful clusters of arches; broken temples; broken tombs. A desert of decay, sombre and desolate beyond all expression; and with a history in every stone that strews the ground.
Charles Dickens
#34. Have you heard of the legends of sleeping kings? The legends that heroes like Llewellyn and Glendower and Arthur aren't really dead, but are instead sleeping in tombs, waiting to be woken?
Maggie Stiefvater
#35. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.
H.P. Lovecraft
#36. The crypt continued on into darkness ahead of them, but beyond this point the tombs were empty and unsealed; black holes waiting for their dead, waiting for him and his children.
George R R Martin
#37. Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
Robert Smithson
#38. Place of the philosopher the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages.
Stephen Greenblatt
#39. The parallels between preserving food and preserving mummies were apparently not lost on posterity. In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city.
Mark Kurlansky
#40. Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.
George Eliot
#41. We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.
Clarence Darrow
#42. Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
Herman Melville
#43. Never did tombs look so ghastly white. Never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funeral gloom. Never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously. Never did bough creak so mysteriously, and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night.
Bram Stoker
#44. Wretched Girl, you must stay here with me! Here amidst these lonely Tombs, these images of Death, these rotting loathsome corrupted bodies! Here shall you stay, and witness my sufferings; witness, what it is to die in the horrors of despondency, and breathe the last groan in blasphemy and curses!
Matthew Gregory Lewis
#45. In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet
("Oil and Blood")
W.B.Yeats
#46. We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.
John Donne
#47. If any kind of obedience, regardless of what motivates it, is what God is after, He would have showcased the Pharisees and exhorted all of us to follow their lead, to imitate them. But He didn't. Jesus called them 'whitewashed tombs'
clean on the outside, dead on the inside.
Tullian Tchividjian
#48. Christianity has no shrines to visit, no dusty remains to venerate, no tombs at which to worship.
Billy Graham
#49. Fame is a revenue payable only to our ghosts; and to deny ourselves all present satisfaction, or to expose ourselves to so much hazard for this, were as great madness as to starve ourselves, or fight desperately for food, to be laid on our tombs after our death.
Henry MacKenzie
#50. When you think about the scale of human populations all over the world and the fact that there's so much here, really, the only way to be able to visualize that is to pull back in space ... It allows us to see hidden temples and tombs and pyramids and even entire settlements.
Sarah Parcak
#52. I'd like another dimension of space, and also the tombs and the dead women, please.
Margaret Atwood
#53. That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt.
Kate Atkinson
#54. The dusty tombs of long-dead exorcist priests lay in the alcoves below, surmounted by stone effigies, the features eroded by the passing of time and the reverent caresses of their grateful parishioners, a reminder, she knew all too well, of the brevity of life.
Sarah Ash
#55. The shameless Chloe placed on the tombs of her seven husbands the inscription, "The work of Chloe." How could she have expressed herself more plainly?
Martial
#56. I believe in reverencing anything in the life of man which has the testimony of the ages as being unexcelled, whether it be literature, paintings, poetry, tombs -- even a golf hole.
C.B. MacDonald
#57. You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.
Khalil Gibran
#58. I will announce some of the tombs I found next to the great pyramid of Khufu. One is an intact tomb that I have not opened yet.
Zahi Hawass
#59. See the wild Waste of all-devouring years! How Rome her own sad Sepulchre appears, With nodding arches, broken temples spread! The very Tombs now vanish'd like their dead!
Alexander Pope
#60. Good night, then - sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly on all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn.
Winston Churchill
#61. Up to 700 A.D., it was assumed that the Christian family cared for their own dead. The clergy played little role in burial and none whatsoever in the arrangement and decoration of tombs.
Peter R.L. Brown
#62. Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#63. She was going to walk into the Sunken City and empty every stinking hole in the Tombs. Let LeBlanc's Goddess explain that to the mob.
Sharon Cameron
#64. The lobbies of the new hotels and the Pan American Building exhale a chill as from the unopened Pharaonic tombs ... And in their marble labyrinths there is an evil presence that hates warmth and sunlight.
Russell Baker
#65. We waste half our strength in a useless regretting; We sit by old tombs in the dark too long.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
#66. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.
Thomas Hardy
#67. All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
William Shakespeare
#68. One hundred infidels committed suicide as they entered the holy city of Baghdad. Their tanks will become their tombs.
Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf
#70. They even say that an altar dedicated to Ulysses , with the addition of the name of his father, Laertes , was formerly discovered on the same spot, and that certain monuments and tombs with Greek inscriptions, still exist on the borders of Germany and Rhaetia .
Tacitus
#71. We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.
Clive Barker
#72. Ah, Robbie, when we are dead and buried in our porphyry tombs, and the trumpet of the Last Judgement is sounded, I shall turn and whisper to you, 'Robbie, Robbie, let us pretend we do not hear it.
Oscar Wilde
#73. You just pull back for hundreds of miles using the satellite imagery, and all of a sudden this invisible world become visible. You're actually able to see settlements and tombs - and even things like buried pyramids - that you might not otherwise be able to see.
Sarah Parcak
#74. It was how it had been with the madman among the tombs, that their number was legion, far in excess at any rate if the number listed on the back of the door as the room's maximum occupancy.
Kem Nunn
#75. References to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual
Dan Brown
#76. And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music, I know it is to be sought in cemeteries: the musicians hide in the tombs; from grave to grave flute trills, harp chords answer one another.
Italo Calvino
#77. There are an incalculable number of things within me that I frantically wish to be emptied of, and despite my most earnest efforts to remove them, they remain. And it is Easter that reminds me that God empties out tombs.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#78. Take what life can give you, Ana, and do not trouble about the offerings which are laid in the tombs for time to crumble.
H. Rider Haggard
#79. For we must bear in mind that the greater number of garden pictures known to us are taken from tombs.
Marie-Luise Gothein
#80. Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#81. Tombs decked by the arts can scarcely represent death as a formidable enemy; we do not, indeed, like the ancients, carve sports and dances in the sarcophagus, but thought is diverted from the bier by works that tell of immortality, even from the altar of death.
Madame De Stael
#83. There is nothing illegal in keeping up a tomb; on the contrary, it is a very laudable thing to do.
Ryan Lindley
#85. They have no gods. They work magic, and think they are gods themselves. But they are not. And when they die, they (...) become dust and bone, and their ghosts whine on the wind a little while till the wind blows them away. They do not have immortal souls.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#87. Retirement without literary amusements is death itself, and a living tomb.
Seneca The Younger
#89. Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?
Khalil Gibran
#92. Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.
Lewis Mumford
#93. Some people die and you realize that the only mark they left on earth are the tomb stones under which they lie. The impacts you make on earth should be something worthy to improve lives.
Israelmore Ayivor
#94. Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb were not and never will be Jewish sites.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#95. The moment in Paris where I saluted Napoleon's tomb was one of the proudest of my life.
Adolf Hitler
#96. Forgetful of thy tomb thou buildest houses.
Horace
#97. Jealousy is cruel as a tomb, its embers are embers of fire.
Solomon
#98. Great is the rose Infected by the tomb, Yet burgeoning Indifferent to death.
Nathalia Crane
#99. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#100. Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived ... I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
