Herman Melville Quotes

I don't know what's on the other side.

I don't know if I believe in life after death so much as I believe that there is something out there.

I think that when I die, it might be some time until I know it.

Death, of course, should not be feared, but awaited with certain wonder. To die was to step across a threshold into a new world, unknown, unimaginable.

We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

'What do you really think happens after you die?' That's the question that everyone, everyone, everyone asks. And I'm so sick of it. But my true answer is, I don't know. And there's no way I'm going to find out 'til it happens.

I think the end is endless. It's either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it's totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn't understand it.

We all wonder about death, where people go and what happens. But certainly, they cross over from this dimension to another one.

There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses--that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

Life's something we already understand. Death is a mystery.

I don't know what's waiting for us when we die--something better, something worse. I only know I'm not ready to find out yet.

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just! Shining nowhere but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust, Could man outlook that mark!

Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.

Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.

Beyond is all abyss, eternity, whose end no eye can reach.

Death is the most misunderstood phenomenon. People have thought of death as the end of life. That is the first, basic misunderstanding.

We all walk in mysteries. We are surrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know nothing at all.

You just never know when you're going into eternity.

Death promises nothing--not even oblivion.

There is no death! What seems so is transition; this life of mortal breath is but a suburb of the life elysian, whose portal we call Death.

All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there.