|
|
Death is the golden key
that
opens the palace of eternity.
John Milton |
|
|
death
|
Death be not
proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
John Donne
|
|
|
It
singeth low in every heart,
We hear it each and all,--
A song of those who answer not,
However we may call;
They throng the silence of the breast,
We see them as of yore,--
The kind, the brave, the true, the sweet,
Who walk with us no more.
John White Chadwick |
|
|
|
|
|
It is a sad
weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a person's death consecrates
him
or her anew to us. It is as if life
were not sacred too, as if it were comparatively
a small
thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother or sister who
has to climb
the whole toilsome mountain with us. It
seems as if all our tears and tenderness
were due to the
one who is spared that hard journey.
George Eliot |
|
|
|
Death
twitches my ear.
"Live," he says, "I am coming."
Virgil |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Our dead brothers
and sisters still live for
us and bid us think of life, not death--
of life to which
in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring.
As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins
again,
and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen
powers
and destinies of good and evil,
our trumpets sound
once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. |
| |
|
|
| |
Like Confucius of old, I am
so absorbed in the wonder of the earth
and the life upon
it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.
Pearl S. Buck |
|
|
|
From the play Our Town --Emily,
a young mother who has died, has come back to earth for
one day to spend time with her friends and family, who
don't know she's there.
Emily:
I can't. I
can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look
at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going
on and we never noticed. Take me back--up the hill--to my
grave. But first, wait! One more look.
Good-by; good-by, world; good-by, Grovers
Corners. . . Mama and papa. Good-by to clocks ticking. .
. and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed
dresses and hot baths. . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh,
earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. (She
looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly through
her tears) Do any human beings ever realize life while
they live it?--every, every minute?
Stage Manager:
No. (Pause) The saints and poets, maybe--they do some.
Emily:
I'm ready to go back.
Thornton Wilder |
|
| |
|
There is no cure for birth or death
save to
enjoy the interval.
George Santayana |
We don't know life:
how can we know
death?
Confucius |
|
| |
|
The nearer I approach death the more I feel
like
one who is in sight of land at last and is about
to
anchor in one's home port after a long voyage.
Cicero |
| |
|
|
| |
|
Life may be considered
altogether as a dream,
and death as the awakening
from sleep.
|
Artur
Schopenhauer
|
|
| |
|
I think on death as the apparent end
of the
illusions that encompass us.
They all have a sudden and
unexpected end,
that challenges any faith we have pinned
to their worth.
Vachel Lindsay |
| |
|
|
| |
A person may by custom
fortify him or herself
against pain, shame and suchlike
accidents;
but as to death, we can experience it but once,
and we are all apprentices when we come to it.
Montaigne |
| |
|
| |
There is nothing that
Nature has made necessary which is more easy than death;
we are longer
coming into the world than going out of it; and there is not any
minute
of our lives wherein we may not reasonably expect it.
Nay, it is but a moment's work,
the parting of the soul and
body. What a shame is it then to stand in fear
of anything so
long that is over so soon!
Lucius Seneca |
| |
|
Let
children walk with Nature, let them see
the beautiful blendings and
communions of death and life,
their joyous inseparable unity, as
taught in woods and meadows. . .
and they will learn that death is
stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
John
Muir |
| |
|
It is
impossible that anything so natural, so necessary,
and so universal as
death should ever
have been designed by Providence as an evil to
mankind.
Jonathan
Swift |
| |
|
|
| |
|
The fear of death
is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom,
being a
pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death,
which people in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the
greatest good.
Plato |
| |
|
Practically
all the progress that humans have made
is due to the fact that they are mortal. . . .
If there were no death, life would become a thing
stagnant, monotonous, and unspeakably burdensome.
Robert
W. Mackenna |
| |
Fear
dying if you must. It takes us from the only life we know,
and that is a worthy loss to mourn. But do not fear death.
It is something too great to celebrate, too great to fear.
Either
it brings us to a judgment, so it is ours to control by the kind
of life we live, or it annihilates us into the great rhythm of nature,
and we join the eternal peace of the revolving heavens.
Kent Nerburn |
| |
| When his great friend Hui-Tzu heard that the
sage Chuang Tzu's wife had died, he immediately went to
console him. But when he arrived at Chuang Tzu's house
he found him singing and drumming on an old tub in front of
his wife's coffin.
Hui Tzu was shocked, and said, "When a wife has lived
with her husband and raised children, and then dies in old
age, it would be difficult to hold back tears. But isn't
it a bit extreme to sing and drum?"
Chuang Tzu said, "No, it's not. When she first
died, it was impossible for me not to mourn for her like
everyone else. But then I reflected on the very
beginning of her existence when she had not yet been
born. Not only had she no life, but she had no bodily
form; not only had she no bodily form, but she had no breath.
"Because of the intermingling of yin and yang, there
ensued a change, and she had breath; another change, and there
was her bodily form; another change, and there came birth and
life. Now there is another change, and she is
dead. The relation between these things is like the
procession of the four seasons from spring to summer, from
autumn to winter.
"Now she lies at peace in her coffin, and if I were to
fall about sobbing and wailing, it would look as if I did not
understand the ways of destiny. I therefore controlled
myself." |
|
| |
|
|
| |
As
we climbed up the mountain and came to where I thought
the horizon would be, it had disappeared--another horizon was
waiting further on. I was disappointed, but also excited in an
unfamiliar way. Each new level had revealed a new world.
Against this perspective, death can be understood as the final
horizon.
Beyond there, the deepest well of your identity awaits you. In
that
well, you will behold the beauty and light of your eternal face.
John O'Donohue |
| |
|
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why
death
should not be an even greater one.
Vladimir Nabokov |
| |
|
Dying
is a wild night and a new road.
Emily
Dickinson |
| |
When the
time comes, I will know that death is a homecoming,
not a wrench that leaves a bruise on my spirit.
Death is not the shadow but the light beyond the shadow.
My spirit will return to its resting place
in a long, slow glide toward peace.
Scottish meditation |
| |
|
The grave is the first stage of the journey into
eternity.
Muhammad |
| |
|
For
the first four years after she died, I felt like an orphan.
Then one night she came to me in a dream, and from that moment on,
I no longer felt her death as a loss. I understood that she had
never
died, that my sorrow was based on an illusion. . . . The reality of my
mother was beyond birth or death. She did not exist because of
birth,
nor cease to exist because of death. I saw that being and
non-being
are not separate. . . . Being able to see my mother in a dream, I
realized
that I could see my mother everywhere.
Thich
Nhat Hanh |
| |
|
|
| |
Death has always been pictured as a dark angel, as a
sinister figure. I wonder if the metaphor of going home
to a mother, to a father, isn't a better and more accurate one.
Norman
Vincent Peale |
| |
|
|
| |
|
