Eleven Memorial Day Quotes

Memorial Day pays tribute to those who have given their lives in service to a greater ideal. It’s a sacrifice unfathomable to many. Whether you visit a graveyard or observe these deaths in other ways, what words or thoughts are sufficient to pay homage to those who have died for something larger than themselves?

1. “The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.”

— Thornton Wilder

2. “Much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. … It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her at all the places where she was alive.”

— John Scalzi

3. “Death never takes the wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go.”

— Jean de la Fontaine

 

4. “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways, I to die and you to live. Which  is better God only knows.”

— Socrates

5. “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

— Oscar Wilde

 

6.
“Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

7. “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

8. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

— Book of Common Prayer

 

9. “I have learned there is no joy without hardship. There is no pleasure without pain. Would we know the comfort of peace without the distress of war?”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 

10. “He made death his ladder to the skies.”

— Baron Brooke Fulke Greville

11. “I’ll wait no more for you like a daughter,

That part of our life together is over

But I will wait for you, forever

Like a river…”

— Carly Simon