Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here."
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.
In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.
The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.
I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. inscription on Kazantakis's tomb in Heraklion, Greece
Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual."
Let there be no inscription upon my tomb; let no man write my epitaph: no man can write my epitaph.