Tom Lehrer Quotes

Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.

This is the secret that none dares tell who fights for a cause. Dying, we are all alike.

[W]e all lie down in our bed of earth as sure to wake as ever we can be to shut our eyes.

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

We rise and fall as one people, one nation.

There are few of us but who have been touched somehow by death. Some may not have been touched closely by it nor yet have kept vigil with it, but somewhere along our lives, most of us are sorely bereft of someone near and deeply cherished - and all of us will some day meet it face to face.

It's unknown the place and uncertain the time where death awaits you; thus you must expect death to find you, every time, at every place.

The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness.

Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.

I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives - this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this.

I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.

And death climbs up the steps one by one.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

It's inevitable that you will die, so the only question is when. The great thrillers are the moments that play and tease with the question, "When will it be?"

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

I know death is the fascinating snake under the leaves, sliding and sliding; I know the heart loves him too, can't turn away, can't break the spell. Everything wants to enter the slow thickness, aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost. Wants to be stone.

One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you've now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You're next.

Let's grow old and die together. Let's do it now.

Death's dark way Must needs be trodden once, however we pause.

Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!

Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labour, and my leisure too, For his civility. We passed the school where children played, Their lessons scarcely done; We passed the fields of gazing grain, We passed the setting sun. We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound. Since then 'tis centuries; but each Feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horses' heads Were toward eternity.

Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a clown.