Epitaph Quotes

1. "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled,Followed their mercenary callingAnd took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended;They stood, and earth's foundations stay;What God abandoned, these defended,And saved the sum of things for pay."
Author: A.E. Housman

2. "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?"
Author: Adam Hochschild

3. "A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.[Alexander's tombstone epitaph]"
Author: Alexander The Great

4. "Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect."
Author: Ambrose Bierce

5. "I didn't want my epitaph to be "She Played It Safe."
Author: Amy Hill Hearth

6. "Maybe our life is an affair of coastlines, of touching on contours, of sand shifting underfoot, of footprints straying a shoreline. No epitaph in granite, no marble eminence, no limestone subtlety. Tracking my prints back is recovering tides' clean sweep, the cleansing services of storms' and winds' abrasive erasures. The only line that matters in the end is forward since home is what we find when we find what it is, they say. Still, standing on the edge of stone seven thousand kilometres wide, my back to a whole past vivid to my eyes, I wonder why, here, it should suddenly begin."
Author: Andrew Taylor

7. "Stop being the shy boy that wants to do everything right and responsibly. I'm sick of your honorable intentions Eli. In fifty years, when I'm old in my bed I want to wake up when the sun shines in my window and know that the person lying beside me was the right choice. I don't want to look at someone else and always wish it was you." ~ Maggie Parsons from Epitaphs from the Afterlife"
Author: Autumn Rosen

8. "EpitaphDen Tigern ertrann ichDie Wanzen nährte ichAufgefressen wurde ichVon den Mittelmäßigkeiten."
Author: Bertolt Brecht

9. "I want no epitaphs of profound history and all that type of thing. I contributed. I would hope they would say that, and I would hope somebody liked me."
Author: Brian Clough

10. "Here the whole world (stars, water, air,And field, and forest, as they wereReflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behindIn ashes, yet with hopes that she,Re-born from holy poverty,In lenten lands, hereafter mayResume them on her Easter Day."(Epitaph for Joy Gresham)"
Author: C.S. Lewis

11. "Si monumentum requiris circumspice(If you seek his monument, look around.)[Epitaph on Wren's tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral]"
Author: Christopher Wren

12. "Maybe she'd remember him as a pain in the ass. Or maybe, he hoped most of all, that she'd remember what she told him: "You can be a real jerk sometimes, but you're decent." As epitaphs went, it wasn't bad."
Author: Dani Harper

13. "I want this epitaph engraved on my tombstone: "See you soon"
Author: Édouard Levé

14. "Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert's horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry – that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man – Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on St Crispin's day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon – these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper."
Author: Evelyn Waugh

15. "I tried and failed. I tried again and again and succeeded.[Epitaph from Gail Borden's gravestone.]"
Author: Gail Borden

16. "As soon seek roses in December, ice in June,Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaffBelieve a woman or an epitaphOr any other thing that's falseBefore you trust in critics."
Author: George Gordon Byron

17. "Epitaph for a dead waiter - God finally caught his eye."
Author: George S. Kaufman

18. "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."
Author: George Sutherland

19. "Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs"
Author: Herman Melville

20. "It had been a bad trip ... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror! ... Exterminate all the brutes!"
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

21. "An epitaph is a belated advertisement for a line of goods that has been discontinued."
Author: Irvin S. Cobb

22. "...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."
Author: Jeaniene Frost

23. "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]"
Author: Johannes Kepler

24. "TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ; The sun is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ; The world's whole sap is sunk ;The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,Compared with me, who am their epitaph."
Author: John Donne

25. "My Own EpitaphLife's a jest, and all things show it.I thought so once, and now I know it."
Author: John Gay

26. "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."
Author: Joseph Conrad

27. "Her close friends have gathered.Lord, ain't it a shameGrieving togetherSharing the blame.But when she was dyingLord, we let her down.There's no use cryin'It can't help her now.The party's all overDrink up and go home.It's too late to love herAnd leave her alone.Just say she was someoneLord, so far from homeWhose life was so lonesomeShe died all aloneWho dreamed pretty dreamsThat never came trueLord, why was she bornSo black and blue?Oh, why was she bornSo black and blue?Epitaph (Black And Blue) Written by: Kris KristoffersonNote: "Epitaph" is about Janis Joplin."
Author: Kris Kristofferson

28. "If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC"
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

29. "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."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

30. "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."
Author: Manil Suri

31. "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."
Author: Mary Roach

32. "Why waste a life in search of an epitaph? ‘Fondly Remembered'. Who other than a halfwit has that chiselled above his head?"
Author: Michael Dobbs

33. "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"
Author: Nicanor Parra

34. "My Epitaph:THIS is Plan B"
Author: Oran Kangas

35. "Reading the epitaphs, our only salvation lies in resurrecting the dead and burying the living."
Author: Paul Eldridge

36. "I picture my epitaph: 'Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown."
Author: Paul Newman

37. "Once someone asked me, "What do you want to be your epitaph?" So I said, "Paulo Coelho died when he was alive."
Author: Paulo Coelho

38. "If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry...thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph."
Author: Philip Sidney

39. "Let no man write my epitaph... When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then shall my character be vindicated, then may my epitaph be written."
Author: Robert Emmet

40. "And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
Author: Robert Frost

41. "Nearly all people stand in great horror of annihilation, and yet to give up your individuality is to annihilate yourself. Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. In this sense, every church is a cemetery and every creed an epitaph."
Author: Robert G. Ingersoll

42. "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;"
Author: Scott Jonathan Nixon

43. "Francis stared down at the Duchess of York's letter. He swallowed, then read aloud in a husky voice, "It was showed by John Sponer that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City." As Margaret listened, the embittered grey eyes had softened, misted with sudden tears. "My brother may lie in an untended grave," she said, "but he does not lack for an epitaph."
Author: Sharon Kay Penman

44. "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."
Author: Sidney Hook

45. "O Stranger, send the news home to the people of Sparta that here weAre laid to rest: the commands they gave us have been obeyed.? ?e??', ??????e?? ?a?eda?µ?????? ?t? t?de?e?µe?a, t??? ?e???? ??µas? pe???µe???.[Epitaph of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae]"
Author: Simonides

46. "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."
Author: Steve Kluger

47. "GERTRUDE (1964) Three men-her husband, a poet, and a young musician-love her, but because none of them will put his love for her before everything else in his live, she rejects them all, preferring to live celibate in Paris and devote herself to the life of mind. In an epilogue, grown old and still alone, she speaks her epitaph: 'I have known love."
Author: Steven Jay Schneider

48. "They say love dies between two people. That's wrong. It doesn't die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren't good enough, worthy enough. It doesn't die; you're the the one that dies. It's like the ocean: if you're no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph"
Author: William Faulkner

49. "Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;Make dust our paper and with rainy eyesWrite sorrow on the bosom of the earth,Let's choose executors and talk of wills"
Author: William Shakespeare

50. "Live your epitaph"
Author: Zoe Weil

Epitaph Quotes Pictures