Quotes & Sayings About Epitaph

My epitaph: He was fun while he lasted. — John Darrin

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

He'd never played in Wrigley Field - the Cubs had still been out at old West Side Grounds when he came through as a catcher for the Cardinals before the First World War. But seeing the ballpark in ruins brought the reality of this war home to him like a kick in the teeth. Sometimes big things would do that, sometimes little ones; he remembered a doughboy breaking down and sobbing like a baby when he found some French kid's dolly with its head blown off. Muldoon's eyes slid over toward Wrigley for a moment. "Gonna be a long time before the Cubs win another pennant," he said, as good an epitaph as any for the park - and the city. — Harry Turtledove

I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: 'Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.' I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have - When he gives everything that is in him to do the job he has before him. That is all you can ask of him and that is what I have tried to do. — Harry S. Truman

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

He ate what was set before him — Robert A. Heinlein

I don't want an epitaph on my gravestone that says, 'He would have pursued some big dreams in his life, but other people wouldn't let him. — Tom Peters

[On an epitaph for herself:] Under here, we're all equal. — Gloria Allred

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

I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world; it is-THE CHARITY OF ITS SILENCE. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my name remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. — Robert Emmet

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

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

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

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. — Thomas Campbell

People asked me what I want as an epitaph: 'He tried' — Mario Cuomo

My Own Epitaph
Life's a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, and now I know it. — John Gay

BRUCE STERLING Homo sapiens declared extinct, Nature, November 11, 1999:
Since I've been asked to offer an epitaph," the highly distributed poetware continued, "I believe that we should rearrange the Great Wall of China to spell out (in Chinese of course, since most of them were always Chinese)
'THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS, BUT NOT AT ALL FAR-SIGHTED. — Bruce Sterling

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

EPITAPH ON AN INFANT Ere Sin could blight or Sorrow fade, Death came with friendly care: The opening Bud to Heaven convey'd, And bade it blossom there. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Then on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name of your favorite candy.
In the end, all you get is a few words. — Scott Nicholson

I wonder how many of our tombstones will have to be inscribed with the epitaph 'Died of too many meetings'? — Hannah Whitall Smith

I desire no other epitaph - no hurry about it, I may say - than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do. — William Osler

Here all may see my body lie/ But not my soul, for that can fly! — Helme Heine

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 — William Faulkner

The future isn't carved in stone, only your epitaph. — Paula Wall

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

Take up the song; forget the epitaph. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I tried and failed. I tried again and again and succeeded.
[Epitaph from Gail Borden's gravestone.] — Gail Borden

You didn't build that' will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host. — Ilana Mercer

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

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. — Sharon Kay Penman

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

I'm sorry. You went too far.'
Lovely. What an epitaph. — Joanne Harris

Here lies W.C.Fields. I'd rather be living in Philadelphia. — W.C. Fields

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. — Rafael Sabatini

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

Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,
bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,
combined with steel and wire and
pollen to make up your firm
and delicate being.
Pablo Neruda's epitaph for Tina Modotti — Pablo Neruda

[Suggesting an epitaph for herself:] This is on me. — Dorothy Parker

Death is a debt to Nature due
Which we have paid and so must you. — Tombstone Epitaph In Tatamagouche Nova Scotia

I wouldn't mind that as my epitaph. — Julie Andrews Edwards

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl. — H.L. Mencken

If you take epitaphs seriously, we ought to bury the living and resurrect the dead. — Mark Twain

History: a collection of epitaphs. — Elbert Hubbard

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

I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph] — Johannes Kepler

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

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree. — Cyril Connolly

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

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And 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. — A.E. Housman

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

When I die of heart failure the next time you frighten me like that, you can put that on my gravestone - 'I didn't mean to startle her. — Patricia Briggs

If flying-saucer creatures or angels or whatever were to come here in a hundred years, say, and find us gone like the dinosaurs, what might be a good message for humanity to leave for them, maybe carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall? Here is this old poop's suggestion: WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES, BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD ... — Kurt Vonnegut

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When they'd been children there'd been a fallen log in the river, and John had walked on it, keeping his balance, instructing his brother: If you don't think about it, you won't fall. - That would be a perfect epitaph, thought Tyler malevolently, crushing the space invader raindrops with his windshield wipers. — William T. Vollmann

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude. — Thornton Wilder

[Dust]
Agatha Morley
all her life
grumbled at dust
like a good wife

...

Six feet under
the earth she lies
with dust at her feet
and dust in her eyes. — Sydney King Russell

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

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. — John Donne

On the stone that remains carved next to his name, his epitaph plain, only a pawn in their game. — Bob Dylan

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

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

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
(Epitaph for Joy Davidman) — C.S. Lewis

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

He [Harpo] loved life and lived it joyously and deeply and that's about as good an epitaph as anyone can have. — Groucho Marx

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth. — Henry David Thoreau

What's fame, after all? It can be what someone writes on your tombstone. — Peter Duncan

Over the epitaph of this generation it will say ENTERTAINED TO DEATH. — Paul Washer

The term 'epitaph' itself means 'something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb.' When an epitaph is a poem written for a tomb, and appears in a book, we are aware that we are not reading it in its proper form: we are reading a reproduction. The original of the epitaph is the tomb itself, with its words cut into the stone. — James Fenton

If I hadn't decided on cremation and a scattering, I could have used the phrase as an epitaph on a chunk of stone or marble: "Tony Webster - He Never Got It." But that would be too melodramatic, even self-pitying. How about "He's on His Own Now"? That would be better, truer. Or maybe I'll stick with: "Every Day Is Sunday. — Julian Barnes

A man's character is best described in his epitaph — Marilyn L. Rice

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. — Robert Emmet

After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. — William Shakespeare

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his Breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-Besotted Traveler; he
Served human liberty. — Jonathan Swift

I want this epitaph engraved on my tombstone: "See you soon — Edouard Leve

It was the saying of a great man, that if we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes, and all princes from slaves; and fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy in a long series of revolutions; beside, for a man to spend his life in pursuit of a title, that serves only when he dies to furnish out an epitaph, is below a wise man's business. — Seneca The Younger

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

Well, Alexander thought, any minute now, one of the girls he had carelessly discarded was going to come by the barracks with a gun and blow his brains out and on his tombstone the epitaph would read, Here lies Alexander, who couldn't remember the name of any girl he had fucked. — Paullina Simons

Epitaph on a scolding wife by her husband: Here my poor Bridget's corpse doth lie, she is at rest - and so am I! — Benjamin Franklin

[When asked what he wants for his tombstone epitaph]
Since I'm an atheist, and have no belief whatsoever in life after death, I couldn't care less
it's not like it'll have any impact on me, since by definition I will be completely extinguished. I guess if someone twisted my arm and forced me to provide an epitaph, it would be 'Don't forget.' Sound advice ... — Richard Bartle

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! — Hunter S. Thompson

I walk through the black Indiana night, under a ceiling of stars, and think about the phrase "elegance and euphoria," and how it describes exactly what I feel with Violet. For once, I don't want to be anyone but Theodore Finch, the boy she sees. He understands what it is to be elegant and euphoric and a hundered different people most of them flawed and stupid, part asshole, part screwup, part freak, a boy who wants to be easy for the folks around him so that he doesn't worry them and, most of all, easy for himself. A boy who belongs - here in the world, here in his own skin. He is exactly who I want to be and what I want my epitaph to say: The Boy Violet Markey Loves. — Jennifer Niven

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

No fear. A fitting epitaph, more curse than blessing, the truth of their very existence. — Cindy Skaggs

Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be
Defence enough against Mortality — Aphra Behn

That should be my epitaph when I die 'she did not have to do it'. — Marie Brennan

I'm a survivor, I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary. — Tobias Wolff

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. — T. S. Eliot

When I die, my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read: I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I dident like. I am so proud of that I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved. And when you come to my grave you will find me sitting there, proudly reading it. — Will Rogers

We grew up with all the Fat Wreck Records and all the Epitaph bands, that era. We mixed it up together. We were never purists of being just pop or just pop-punk. We always wanted to blend everything that we love. — Chuck Comeau

The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures, but at the same time, improved the people's standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggests that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism. The results speak for themselves. 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: Si monumentum requires, circumspice. — Ludwig Von Mises

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

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

I joked about every prominent man in my lifetime, but I never met one I didn't like. — Will Rogers

So we're tempted to despair - the despair of the not-as-great-as-we-want-to-be. Charles Spurgeon's epitaph on Alexander could easily describe one way we can go: See Alexander's tears! He weeps! Yes, he weeps for another world to conquer! Ambition is insatiable! The gain of the whole world is not enough. Surely to become a universal monarch, is to make one's self universally miserable.13 — Dave Harvey

I knew if I waited around long enough something like this would happen. — George Bernard Shaw

Here lies clever Trevor;
Truth was not his friend.
He lied until the end;
Now, he'll lie forever. — Esther Spurrill Jones

All things considered, the happiest epitaph to have etched on one's headstone is this: 'He never knew what hit him'. — Thomas Ligotti

Let me tell you how the story ends, where the good guys die and the bad guys win. It doesn't matter how many friend you make, but the graffite they write on your grave. — Gerard Way

Her close friends have gathered.
Lord, ain't it a shame
Grieving together
Sharing the blame.
But when she was dying
Lord, we let her down.
There's no use cryin'
It can't help her now.

The party's all over
Drink up and go home.
It's too late to love her
And leave her alone.

Just say she was someone
Lord, so far from home
Whose life was so lonesome
She died all alone
Who dreamed pretty dreams
That never came true
Lord, why was she born
So black and blue?
Oh, why was she born
So black and blue?

Epitaph (Black And Blue)
Written by: Kris Kristofferson
Note: "Epitaph" is about Janis Joplin. — Kris Kristofferson