C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Grave
Dark lattice! letting in eternal day!
The cradle of transformation.
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep.
The temple of silence and reconciliation.
The grave where even the great find rest.
Gilded tombs do worms infold.
Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound.
To that dark inn, the Grave!
Never the grave gives back what it has won!
Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years.
Lie lightly on my ashes, gentle earth!
My heart is its own grave!
How populous, how vital is the grave!
The grave has a door on its inner side.
Who’s a prince or beggar in the grave?
Death ends our woes, and the kind grave shuts up the mournful scene.
The reconciling grave.
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.
Grass grows at last above all graves.
The graves of those we have loved and lost distress and console us.
Where blended lie the oppressor and the oppressed.
Each in his narrow cell forever laid, the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.
That unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave!
How peaceful and how powerful is the grave!
Earth’s highest station ends in—Here he lies.
The earth opens impartially her bosom to receive the beggar and the prince.
The grave is a common treasury, to which we must all be taken.
He spake well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.
We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i’ the cold ground.
Tombs are the clothes of the dead; a grave is but a plain suit, and a rich monument is one embroidered.
I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard than in the tomb of the Capulets.
Lay her i’ the earth; and from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring.
Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.
All that tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom.
This is the field and acre of our God; this is the place where human harvests grow.
Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store, and he that cares for most shall find no more.
Oh, how a small portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living!
If thou hast no inferiors, have patience awhile, and thou shalt have no superiors. The grave requires no marshal.
From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections.
The reconciling grave swallows distinction first, that made us foes; there all lie down in peace together.
We go to the grave of a friend saying, “A man is dead;” but angels throng about him, saying, “A man is born.”
An angel’s arm can’t snatch me from the grave—legions of angels can’t confine me there!
The grave—dread thing!—men shiver when thou art named; Nature, appalled, shakes off her wonted firmness.
However bright the comedy before, the last act is always stained with blood. The earth is laid upon our head, and there it lies forever.
The earth doth not cover our beloved, but heaven hath received him; let us tarry for awhile, and we shall be in his company.
Who can look down upon the grave of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb that he should have warred with the poor handful of dust that lies mouldering before him?
That gloomy outside, like a rusty chest, contains the shining treasures of a soul resolved and brave.
The grave is a very small hillock, but we can see farther from it, when standing on it, than from the highest mountain in all the world.
Without settled principle and practical virtue, life is a desert; without Christian piety, the contemplation of the grave is terrible.
It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore.
Sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave like one that wraps the drapery of his couch about him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
The grave is a crucible where memory is purified; we only remember a dead friend by those qualities which make him regretted.
The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.
As a tract of country narrowed in the distance expands itself when we approach, thus the way to our near grave appears to us as long as it did formerly when we were far off.
The disciples found angels at the grave of Him they loved; and we should always find them too, but that our eyes are too full of tears for seeing.
Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those that come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.
Graves, the dashes in the punctuation of our lives. To the Christian they are but the place at which he gathers breath for a nobler sentence. To Christ, the grave was but the hyphen between man and God, for He was God-man.
We adorn graves with flowers and redolent plants, just emblems of the life of man, which has been compared in the Holy Scriptures to those fading beauties whose roots, being buried in dishonor, rise again in glory.
There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master.
The grave is a sacred workshop of nature! a chamber for the figure of the body; death and life dwell here together as man and wife. They are one body, they are in union; God has joined them together, and what God hath joined together let no man put asunder.
There is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. Oh, the grave! the grave! It buries every error, covers every defect, extinguishes every resentment. From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections.
For ages the world has been waiting and watching; millions, with broken hearts, have hovered around the yawning abyss; but no echo has come back from the engulfing gloom—silence, oblivion, covers all. If indeed they survive; if they went away whole and victorious, they give us no signals. We wait for years, but no messages come from the far-away shore to which they have gone.
Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles as peacefully as ever it lay in its mother’s arms, and the workman’s hands lie still by his side, and the thinker’s brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl’s broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame.
When the dusk of evening had come on, and not a sound disturbed the sacred stillness of the place,—when the bright moon poured in her light on tomb and monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (it seemed to them) upon her quiet grave,—in that calm time, when all outward things and inward thoughts teem with assurances of immortality, and worldly hopes and fears are humbled in the dust before them,—then, with tranquil and submissive hearts they turned away, and left the child with God.