49 Quotes About the Deceased

Dealing with the sudden loss of a loved one can leave you in an emotionally devastated state. These quotes about the deceased help to highlight the emotions and transitions we go through after experiencing a deep sense of loss.

“A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.”

“Be a dreamer. If you don’t know how to dream, you’re dead.”

“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.”

“Can miles truly separate you from friends? If you want to be with someone you love, aren’t you already there?”

“Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

“Don’t send me flowers when I’m dead. If you like me, send them while I’m alive.”

“Even the best of friends cannot attend each other’s funeral.”

“Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.”

“He spake well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.”

“He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

“He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.”

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.”

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

“If a man can bridge the gap between life and death, if he can live on after he’s dead, then maybe he was a great man.”

“If I cry, it’s because I’m very angry and I can’t do anything about it because I’ve run into a dead end. That’s when the tears would come down.”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?”

“I’m the one that’s got to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“It hurts when you lose a friend to death, it hurts even more when you lose a friend still living.”

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”

“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”

“Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.”

“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”

“Painful though parting be, I bow to you as I see you off to distant clouds.”

“Rather be dead than cool.”

“Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.”

“Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same.”

“That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it’s reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.”

“The comfort of having a friend may be taken away, but not that of having had one.”

“The death of a friend is equivalent to the loss of a limb.”

“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.”

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

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”

“The loss of a friend is like that of a limb; time may heal the anguish of the wound, but the loss cannot be repaired.”

“The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.”

“The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.”

“The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.”

“There’s a thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die; their silence.”

“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.”

“This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad.”

“Those we love and lose are always connected by heartstrings into infinity.”

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

“Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.”

“When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time.”

“While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil.”

“You cannot stop loving your friend because he’s dead, especially if he was better than anyone alive, you know?”

“Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, Advanced a stage or two upon that road Which you must travel in the steps they trod.”

Dealing with the loss of a loved one can require some ongoing encouragement to find your way down a path of healing.