Poetry and Quotes

Short Quotes and Poems for a Eulogy or Sympathy Card

Browse through this page of short quotes and poems, maybe you’ll find the perfect words to express your feelings.

Grief is the price we pay for love.
-Unknown Author

Until we meet again, may God
Hold you in the palm of his hand.
- Irish Prayer

Tears water our growth.
- William Shakespeare

When someone you love becomes a memory,
the memory becomes a treasure.
- Unknown Author

Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time... It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other. by Leo Buscaglia

If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.
-Unknown Author

May you find comfort in the arms of an angel.
- Unknown Author

'Say not in grief 'he is no more' but live in thankfulness that he was'
- Hebrew proverb

Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but rather openings where our loved ones
shine down to let us know they are happy.
- Unknown Author

As you danced in the light with joy, love lifted you. As you brushed against this world so gently, you lifted us. - - - T.C. Ring

The memory of a good person is a blessing.
- Proverb 10:7

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced
Live your life in a manner that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice
- Native American Proverb

...In the midst of death we are in life.
- Author Unknown

The journey is the reward
- Tao Saying

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched.
They must be felt with the heart.
- Helen Keller

What we have once enjoyed
we can never lose;
All that we love deeply,
- Helen Keller

We shall find peace. We shall hear angels,
we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."
- Chekov

Make yourself familiar with the angels,
and behold them
frequently in spirit; for without being seen,
they are present with you.
- Saint Francis de Sales

To love for the sake of being loved is human,
but to love for the sake of loving is angelic."
- Alphonse de Lamartine

Those we love can never be
more than a thought apart,
far as long as there is memory,
they'll live on in the heart.
- Unknown Author

The guardian angels of life sometimes fly so high as to be beyond
our sight, but they are always looking down upon us."
- Jean Paul Richter

When hearts listen, angels sing.
- Unknown Author

Those we love remain with us
for love itself lives on,
- Unknown Author

Let us be silent that we may hear the whisper of God.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Then the child opened its eyes, and looked up into the angel's beautiful face, which beamed with happiness, and at the same moment they were in heaven, where joy and bliss reigned. The child received wings like the other angel, and they flew about together, hand in hand.
- Hans Christian Andersen

Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.
- Proverb

Death leaves a heartache
no one can heal;
Love leaves a memory no
one can steal
- Irish Tombstone

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we
take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
- Unknown Author

Those we love don't go away,
They walk beside us every day,
Unseen, unheard, but always near,
Still loved, still missed and very dear.
- Unknown Author

Don't be sad-
I am in a snowflake,
I am in the rays of sun,
I am in the sparkling of stars
- Unknown Author

Those we love don't go away,
They walk beside us every day,
Unseen, unheard, but always near,
Still loved, still missed and very dear.
- Unknown Author

The next place that I go
will be as peaceful and familiar
as a sleepy summer Sunday
and a sweet, untroubled mind.
– Warren Hanson

Love is like a butterfly; it goes where it pleases
and pleases wherever it goes.
- Unknown Author

Gone yet not forgotten,
although we are apart,
your spirit lives within me,
forever in my heart.
- Unknown Author

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.
- Amelia Burr

People living deeply have no fear of death.
- Anais Nin

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.
- Albert Einstein

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
- Albert Einstein

The idea is to die young as late as possible.
- Ashley Montagu

God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.
- Unknown Author

Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! ... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.
- David Sarnoff

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
- Edvard Munch

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality
- Emily Dickinson

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
- Ernest Becker

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
- Erik H. Erikson

Death is a debt we all must pay.
-Euripides

If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn't going to be much fun.
- Unknown Author

Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again.
- George Eliot, The Choir Invisible

Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.
- Herodotus

Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor.
- Homer, Iliad

And they die an equal death - the idler and the man of mighty deeds.
- Homer, Iliad

Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
- Henry Van Dyke

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident - It is as common as life.
- Henry David Thoreau

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
- Isaac Asimov

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death.
- James F. Bymes

God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality.
- Jacques Rigaut, Pensées

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.
- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees.
- J.J. Furnas

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
- Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go.
- Jean de La Fontaine

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
- John Muir

God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath.
- John Donne

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death.
- Kenneth Patchen

For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
- ~Kahlil Gibran, from "The Prophet"

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
- Leonardo Da Vinci

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.
- Leonardo Da Vinci

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.
- Lord Byron

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.
- Madame de Stael

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.
- Mark Twain

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
- Mark Twain

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
- Marcel Proust

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
- Marcel Proust

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
- Maurice Maeterlinck

Death is a release from the impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and the hard service of the flesh.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure.
- Mortimer Collins

The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.
- Mignon McLaughlin

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
- Norman Cousins

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.
- Percival Arland Ussher

No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well.
- Plato

Death is patiently making my mask as I sleep. Each morning I awake to discover in the corners of my eyes the small tears of his wax.
- Philip Dow

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.
- Robert Fulghum

Gaily I lived as ease and nature taught,
And spent my little life without a thought,
And am amazed that Death, that tyrant grim,
Should think of me, who never thought of him.
- René Francois Regnier

I wouldn't mind dying - it's the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me.
- R. Geis

You can be a king or a street sweeper,
but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.
- Robert Alton Harris

Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream.
- Ryokan

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
- Samuel Butler

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.
- Seneca

The goal of all life is death.
- Sigmund Freud

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
- Socrates

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
- Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky

God made death so we'd know when to stop.
- Steven Stiles

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
- Steven Wright

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
- Stewart Alsop

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
- Tennessee Williams, "The Rose Tattoo"

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
- Thomas Browne

Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
- Toni Morrison

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
- W. Somerset Maugham

I want a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant clergyman. I want to hedge my bets.
- Wilson Mizner

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
- Willa Cather

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
- Winston Churchill

Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death.
- Witter Bynner, "The Patient to the Doctors"

For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.
- William Penn

And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
– Khalil Gibran

Those we love remain with us for love itself lives on, and cherished memories never fade because a loved one's gone. Those we love can never be more than a thought apart, far as long as there is memory, they'll live on in the heart.
- Mary Alice Ramish

We are such stuff Dreams are made on; And our little life is rounded with a sleep.
--The Tempest, Shakespeare

Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep. He hath awakened from the dream of life.
- Percy Bysshe Shelly