Funerary customs Quotes

Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

Death possesses a good deal, of real estate, namely, the graveyard in every town.

I turned and faced the Olympians. "We need a shroud," I announced, my voice cracking. "A shroud for the son of Hermes.

I have seen a thousand graves opened, and always perceived that whatever was gone, the teeth and hair remained of those who had died with them. Is not this odd? They go the very first things in youth and yet last the longest in the dust.

Without at all invalidating what we have just said, we believe that a perpetual remembrance of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.

A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.

While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.

Nothing for preserving the body like having no heart.

In Moscow they do not pay much attention to the living but keep their cemeteries in a splendid state.

The dead are celebrated. The dead are loved. They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it.

Cemeteries have always had a lure for me. They are well kept, free from ambiguity, logical, virile, and alive. In cemeteries you can summon up courage and arrive at decisions, in cemeteries life takes on distinct contours -- I am not referring to the borders of the graves -- and if you will, a meaning.

I think at the moment we did not even want to break the seal [on the inner chamber of the tomb of Tutankhamen], for a feeling of intrusion had descended heavily upon us... We felt that we were in the presence of the dead King and must do him reverence, and in imagination could see the doors of the successive shrines open one.

The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

Nowhere probably is there more true feeling, and nowhere worse taste, than in a churchyard - both as regards the monuments and the inscriptions. Scarcely a word of true poetry anywhere.

We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.

Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets [of New Orleans] to it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.

I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.

You shall not pile, with servile toil, Your monuments upon my breast, Nor yet within the common soil, Lay down the wreck of power to rest...

The Church will pray to God for the dead. The survivor has honour and glory.

The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living.

I have frequently thought that the dead should be buried with all their belongings. It seems weirdly perverse that their clothes should still be here when the people you love best in the world have gone.

The images of twenty of the most illustrious families the Manlii, the Quinctii, and other names of equal splendour were carried before it [the bier of Junia]. Those of Brutus and Cassius were not displayed; but for that very reason they shone with pre-eminent lustre.

In the islands of the Aegean Sea, every island is full of graves.

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.