Last Words of Famous People

Fearful Last Words:

Cardinal Borgia: “I have provided in the course of my life for everything except death, and now, alas, I am to die unprepared.”

Elizabeth the First: “All my possessions for one moment of time.”

Kurt Cobain (suicide note): “Frances and Courtney, I’ll be at your altar. Please keep going Courtney, for Frances. For her life will be so much happier without me. I love you. I love you.”

Ludwig van Beethoven: “Too bad, too bad! It’s too late!”

Thomas Hobbs: “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.”

Anne Boleyn: “O God, have pity on my soul. O God, have pity on my soul.”

Prince Henry of Wales: “Tie a rope round my body, pull me out of bed, and lay me in ashes, that I may die with repentant prayers to an offended God. O! I in vain wish for that time I lost with you and others in vain recreations.”

Socrates: “All of the wisdom of this world is but a tiny raft upon which we must set sail when we leave this earth. If only there was a firmer foundation upon which to sail, perhaps some divine word.”

Sigmund Freud: “The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.”

Tony Hancock (British comedian): “Nobody will ever know I existed. Nothing to leave behind me. Nothing to pass on. Nobody to mourn me. That’s the bitterest blow of all.”

Phillip III, King of France: “What an account I shall have to give to God! How I should like to live otherwise than I have lived.”

Luther Burbank: “I don’t feel good.”

Voltaire (skeptic): “I am abandoned by God and man! I will give you half of what I am worth if you will give me six months’ life. Then I shall go to hell; and you will go with me. O Christ! O Jesus Christ!” (The talented French writer once said of Jesus, “Curse the wretch!” He stated, “Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror ...Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.”) He also boasted, “In twenty years Christianity will be no more. My single hand shall destroy the edifice it took twelve apostles to rear.” Some years later, Voltaire’s house was used by the Geneva Bible Society to print Bibles.

Philosophical Last Words:

Aldus Huxley (humanist): “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try and be a little kinder.’”

Karl Marx: “Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”

Napoleon: “I marvel that where the ambitious dreams of myself and of Alexander and of Caesar should have vanished into thin air, a Judean peasant—Jesus—should be able to stretch his hands across the centuries, and control the destinies of men and nations.”

Leonardo da Vinci: “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”

Tolstoy: “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.”

Benjamin Franklin: “A dying man can do nothing easy.”

Grotius: “I have lived my life in a laborious doing of nothing.”

Unexpected Demise:

H. G. Wells: “Go away: I’m alright.”

General John Sedgwick (during the heat of battle in 1864): “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist——!”

Bing Crosby: “That was a great game of golf.”

Mahatma Ghandi: “I am late by ten minutes. I hate being late. I like to be at the prayer punctually at the stroke of five.”

Diana (Spencer), Princess of Wales: “My God. What’s happened?” (per police files)

Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.: “Never felt better.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt: “I have a terrific headache.”

Sal Mineo: (stabbed through the heart): “Oh God! No! Help! Someone help!”

Jesse James: “It’s awfully hot today.”

Lee Harvey Oswald: “I will be glad to discuss this proposition with my attorney, and that after I talk with one, we could either discuss it with him or discuss it with my attorney, if the attorney thinks it is a wise thing to do, but at the present time I have nothing more to say to you.”

Unusual Last Words:

Vincent Van Gogh: “I shall never get rid of this depression.”

James Dean: “My fun days are over.”

Oscar Wilde: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go . . .”

W. C. Fields: “I’m looking for a loophole.”

Louis XVII: “I have something to tell you . . .”

Assurance of Salvation:

Jonathan Edwards: “Trust in God and you shall have nothing to fear.”

Patrick Henry: “Doctor, I wish you to observe how real and beneficial the religion of Christ is to a man about to die . . .” In his will he wrote: “This is all the inheritance I give to my dear family. The religion of Christ which will give them one which will make them rich indeed.”

John Owen: “I am going to Him whom my soul loveth, or rather who has loved me with an everlasting love, which is the sole ground of all my consolation.”

D. L. Moody: “I see earth receding; heaven is opening. God is calling me.”

Lew Wallace (author of Ben Hur): “Thy will be done.”

Alexander Hamilton: “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am a sinner. I look to Him for mercy.”

William Shakespeare: “I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting; and my body to the earth, whereof it was made.”

Martin Luther: “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit! Thou hast redeemed me, O God of truth.”

John Milton (British poet): “Death is the great key that opens the palace of Eternity.”

Sir Walter Raleigh (at his execution): “So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lieth.”

Daniel Webster (just before his death): “The great mystery is Jesus Christ—the gospel. What would the condition of any of us be if we had not the hope of immortality? . . . Thank God, the gospel of Jesus Christ brought life and immortality to light.” His last words were: “I still live.”

General William Booth (to his son): “And the homeless children, Bramwell, look after the homeless. Promise me . . .”

David Livingstone: “Build me a hut to die in. I am going home.”

Charles Dickens: “I commit my soul to the mercy of God, through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try and guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament.”

Andrew Jackson: “My dear children, do not grieve for me . . . I am my God’s. I belong to Him. I go but a short time before you, and ...I hope and trust to meet you all in heaven.”

Isaac Watts (hymn-writer): “It is a great mercy that I have no manner of fear or dread of death. I could, if God please, lay my head back and die without terror this afternoon.”