Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes

I have a suit in my closet with the pocket cut out. It's a reminder to me that I won't be taking anything with me. The last suit I wear won't need any pockets.

When we are dead; rugs are no richer than a quick-thorn bed.

The last suit that you wear, you don't need any pockets.

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

We have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either.' There are no U-Hauls behind hearses.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

At root fame is a sham. I'm not going to live forever and if I am I certainly need don't you to tell me that so that I will buy a car or a box of dried up crackers.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

I don't have anything that I treasure at all. They're just things. I tend to buy an awful lot of stuff, like clothes and things. But I wouldn't be bothered if my house burns down tomorrow.

Everything I have is for sale. Material items are just things that pass through your hands that mean very little or nothing.

We all go to our grave thinking that we will never be forgotten, and we are forgotten ten minutes later.

Naked a man comes into the world and naked he leaves it, after all is said and done he leaves nothing except the good deeds he leaves behind.

We are born into this world with clenched fists, we leave it with fingers apart- preaching the lesson that you take nothing with you.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

To venerate the simple days Which lead the seasons by, Needs but to remember That from you or I They may take the trifle Termed mortality!

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.

Going to a junkyard is a sobering experience. There you can see the ultimate destination of almost everything we desired.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

Unvisited tombstones, unread diaries, and erased video game high-score rankings are three of the most potent symbols of mankind's pathetic and fruitless attempts at immortality.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

Worms'-Meat, n. The finished product of which we are the raw material. The contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and the Granitarium. Worms'-meat is usually outlasted by the structure that houses it, but "this too must pass away." Probably the silliest work in which a human being can engage is construction of a tomb for himself. The solemn purpose cannot dignify, but only accentuates by contrast the foreknown futility.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.