Henry Van Dyke Quotes

Even if you live forty or fifty years in this world, and then die, you cannot take all your goods with you.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

When we die our money, fame, and honors will be meaningless. We own nothing in this world. Everything we think we own is in reality only being loaned to us until we die. And on our deathbed at the moment of death, no one but God can save our souls.

Our bodies will be recycled one way or another, but what about our ideas and minds and characters? Primordial soup? The bourne from which no traveller returns? Interesting and exciting.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

Lies here food for the worms yet the work shall not be lost.

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

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.

As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.

Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.

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

We die, and we do not die.

Property is theft. Nobody "owns" anything. When you die, it all stays here.

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.

When you think about it, the end of the world is a little bit like death: We all know it's going to come eventually, and as we get older, we feel we see the signs more and more distinctly.

It's a very big deal to me to remain the same person because I know all of this is going to be gone one day and I'm just going to have myself.

The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.

Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.

Death is like taking an intermission when you can't come back. I like living and being around.

On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly.

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.

Glory comes too late, after one as been reduced to ashes.

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.