Eulogy quotes

The commonest mistake with eulogy quotes is putting one first. An opening quotation tells a room that the speech is about death in general, and the room is not there for death in general. It is there for one person.

The same is true of the last line. A eulogy that ends on somebody else’s sentence hands away the only moment the room will remember. End on your own words, said directly to them.

Where a quote earns its place is in the middle — as a hinge between two stories, or to name something you have described but not summarised. Used there, once, it lands. Used three times, it becomes an anthology.

One test before any of the lists below. If the person would not have recognised the quote, ask why it is in their eulogy. A line they said themselves — a piece of advice, a complaint they made weekly, the thing they said whenever anything went wrong — beats every famous quotation ever written, because the room recognises it.

For someone who died old, where the mood is closer to gratitude than to shock.

• “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” — Thomas Campbell
• “What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” — Helen Keller
• “As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.” — Leonardo da Vinci
• “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” — Abraham Lincoln
• “It is not length of life, but depth of life.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” — Ernest Hemingway
• “The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” — William Wordsworth
• “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” — Pericles
• “As is a tale, so is a life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.” — Seneca
• “A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.” — Maya Angelou

• “Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.” — Rabindranath Tagore
• “Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.” — Rossiter W. Raymond
• “The journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take.” — J. R. R. Tolkien
• “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.” — Kahlil Gibran
• “Death ends a life, not a relationship.” — Mitch Albom
• “Life has to end. Love doesn’t.” — Mitch Albom
• “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” — Cicero
• “Those we love never truly leave us. There are things that death cannot touch.” — Jack Thorne
• “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” — J. K. Rowling
• “Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.” — Inuit proverb

• “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; love leaves a memory no one can steal.” — Irish proverb
• “Grief is the price we pay for love.” — Elizabeth II
• “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” — A. A. Milne
• “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” — attributed to Dr Seuss
• “There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.” — George Sand
• “When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure.” — Anonymous
• “Wherever a beautiful soul has been, there is a trail of beautiful memories.” — Ronald Reagan
• “Where there is deep grief, there was great love.” — Anonymous
• “The greatest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.” — Thornton Wilder
• “The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.” — Irving Berlin
• “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” — C. S. Lewis
• “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.” — Harriet Beecher Stowe

• “Love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.” — J. K. Rowling
• “Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me at all.” — Anonymous
• “A mother’s arms are more comforting than anyone else’s.” — attributed to Diana, Princess of Wales

• “Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever.” — Anonymous
• “There is no expiration date on the love between a father and his child.” — Anonymous
• “It is a wise father that knows his own child.” — William Shakespeare

Short works better in print than aloud, so the rules reverse here. These sit on a page without crowding it.

• “Always loved, never forgotten, forever missed.”
• “Until we meet again.”
• “The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.”
• “Loved beyond words, missed beyond measure.”
• “A life measured in moments, not years.”
• “Gone from our sight, never from our hearts.”
• “Rest now.”

• “I intend to live forever. So far, so good.” — Steven Wright
• “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.” — attributed to Oscar Wilde
• “I can’t think of a more wonderful thanksgiving for the life I have had than that everyone should be jolly at my funeral.” — Lady Diana Cooper

If they were genuinely funny, a story about them will do more than any of these. Funny eulogy examples has three complete eulogies that use humour without a single borrowed line.

• “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” — Matthew 25:21
• “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.” — Psalm 23:6
• “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” — 2 Timothy 4:7

If the service is religious, Christian eulogy examples sets out the Bible verses that suit a eulogy rather than a liturgy. They are not the same list, and the officiant will already have covered the liturgy.

1. Introduce it in your own voice. “There is a line I keep coming back to this week” does more work than reading the quotation cold.
2. Say who wrote it. An unattributed line sounds like a greetings card even when it is Gibran.
3. Follow it with something concrete. The quote names the idea; your next sentence gives the room the example.
4. Read it slower than feels natural. Quotations at conversational speed sound like an announcement.
5. One is enough. Two is the maximum.

The best quote in most eulogies is not on a list anywhere. Ask two or three family members and one close friend the same narrow question: what did they always say? Not “what was he like” — that produces “he was a wonderful man”, which you cannot use. The narrow question produces the catchphrase, the piece of advice, the complaint. One of those is usually the line the whole eulogy should hang on, and everyone in the room has heard it before.

Eulogy examples has six complete eulogies you can read straight through. How to start a eulogy covers openings. How to end a eulogy covers the last two lines, which are the ones people remember. Eulogy templates gives you a structure to drop all of this into. Celebration of life speech examples covers the less formal service.