death
- death 2
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Death is not
putting out the light.
It is only extinguishing a lamp
because the day has come.
Rabindranath
Tagore
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All
human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal
river of time,
embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at
another point in
order to make room for others waiting below the river to
come aboard.
Lin
Yutang
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In
the Buddhist approach, life and death are seen as one whole,
where death is the beginning of another chapter of
life. Death is the mirror in which the entire meaning
of life is reflected.
Sogyal Rinpoche
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We've discovered that the earth isn't
flat; that we won't fall off its edges,
and our experience as a species has changed as a
result. Maybe we'll
soon find out that the self isn't "flat" either,
and that death is as real and
yet as deceptive as the horizon; that we don't fall out of
life either.
Seth
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Naturally,
the first thing the doctors told me about the accident was
that even if she survived she'd never be the same; she might
be paralyzed
or have permanent brain damage. And do you know, in my
maternal
selfishness the only thing I cared about was that she should
stay alive;
it didn't matter in what state. Indeed, pushing her
wheelchair, washing
her, spoonfeeding her, looking after her as my life's sole
purpose--that
would be the best way to expiate my guilt. If my love
had been genuine,
if I had loved her with all my heart, I would have prayed
for her death. But in the end Someone loved her more than I did: late
in the afternoon
on the ninth day, that vague smile disappeared from her face
and she died.
Susanna Tamaro
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Surely
death acquires a new and deeper significance when we regard
it
no longer as a single and unexplained break in an unending
life, but as
a part
of the continuously recurring rhythm of progress--as
inevitable,
as natural and benevolent as sleep.
J.
McTaggart |
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It is
too bad that dying is the last thing we do,
because it could teach us so much about living.
Robert M. Herhold |
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Death
is the end of a stage,
not the end
of the journey.
The road stretches on
beyond our comprehension.
Oliver
Lodge
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When
any living thing has come to
the
end of its cycle, we accept that
end
as natural. When that intangible
cycle
has run its course it is a natural
and not unhappy thing that a life
comes to its end.
Rachel
Carson |
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Embrace
your death. . . . Cherish your awareness of death as
a gift from the universe.
Brian
Swimme |
To
die should be the most interesting journey
of all the journeys a person can take.
Jan
Willem van de Wetering
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Die every day.
Be reborn again every day.
Nikos
Kazantzakis
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Let life
be beautiful like summer flowers
and death be like autumn leaves.
Rabindranath
Tagore |
What
a simple thing death is, just as simple
as the falling
of an autumn leaf.
Vincent
van Gogh
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Ideally,
every human being ought to live each passing moment of his
or her life as if the next moment were to be his or her
last. We ought
to be able to live in the constant expectation of immediate
death and
to live like this, not morbidly, but serenely.
Arnold
Toynbee
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Since we live with death, we ought to think
of it while living.
To settle accounts, to draw a balance, is important and
useful.
The pastors should make it clear that it can be anyone's
turn next;
that everyone's turn comes at some point; that to prepare
oneself is good.
Peter Noll
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When
the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant
to walk in. . . . How beautifully they go to their
graves! How
gently lay themselves down and turn to mould. They
teach us
how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come
when people,
with our boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as
gracefully and
ripe--with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed our
bodies.
Henry
David Thoreau
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Perhaps
the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life
has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time
when you were not:
that gives us no concern. Why then should it trouble
us that a time will
come when we shall cease to be? To die is only to be
as we were before we were born.
William
Hazlitt
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Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I lay me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be:
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Robert
Louis Stevenson
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For myself, I do not need to look in terms of
survival after death.
I feel myself to be a part of the known properties of the
earth's family,
and that is enough. One day, the breath I have been
privileged to use
will become again a part of the earth's family being. . . .
If there is another
place to catch up with the "breath," I hope it
will be as challenging as
it has been here; but if it does not exist, it is enough
that I have lived.
Eileen D. Garrett |
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We
are spirits. That bodies should be lent us while they
afford us
pleasure,
assist us in acquiring knowledge or in doing good to our
fellow-creatures,
is a kind of benevolent act of God. When they
become
unfit for these purposes
and afford us pain instead of
pleasure, instead of an aid
become an encumbrance
and answer
none of these intentions for which they were
given, it is equally
kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we
get rid of them. Death is that way.
Benjamin
Franklin
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A
human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each
time
with its own particular beauty and power. And
gift. By focusing on
springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of
life
into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration
and
appreciation. Life is neither linear nor
stagnant. It is movement
from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes
autumn
and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as
an integral part of the way life is made.
Rachel
Naomi Remen
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Death
is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time.
It tells us
to tell each other right now that we love each other.
Leo
Buscaglia |
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In
the Mahabharata, a Hindu sacred text, one of life's great
mysteries
is said
to be how ordinary mortals go through their lives surrounded
by death, yet
they don't believe they will die. The meaning of this
observation is that although
we know intellectually that we are going
to die, we do not
live as if that were a
reality; we do not consciously let
the real certainty of
death guide us in
how we choose to live day by day.
Richard Moss |
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There
are so many little dyings every day,
it doesn't matter which
one of them is death.
Kenneth Patchen |
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I have
died so little today, friend, forgive me.
Thomas Lux |
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For
what is it to die but to stand naked
in the wind and to melt
into the sun.
Khalil Gibran |
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Why
is it we are afraid of death?--as most people
are. Frightened of what? Do please
observe your own fears of what we call death-- being
frightened of coming to the end of the battle we
call living. We are frightened of the unknown,
what might happen; we are frightened of leaving the
known things, the family, the books, the attachment
to our house and furniture, to the people near
us. We are frightened to let go of the things
known; and the known is this living in sorrow, pain,
and despair, with occasional flashes of joy; there
is no end to this constant struggle; that is what we
call living--of that we are frightened to let go. .
. . Can one die to everything that is
"known," psychologically, from day to
day? Can one die, psychologically, to all
one's past, to all the attachments, fears, to the
anxiety, vanity, and pride, so completely that
tomorrow you wake up a fresh human being?
J. Krishnamurti |
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death
- death 2
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The
Master came, because it was his time to be born; he went,
because it was his time to go away. Those who accept
the natural
course and sequence of things and live in obedience to it
are beyond joy and sorrow.
Chuang Tzu |
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We can harness the
awareness of death to appreciate the fact that we
are alive, to encourage self-exploration, to clarify our
values, to find
meaning, and to generate positive action. It is the
impermanence of
life that gives us perspective. As we come in contact
with life's
precarious nature, we also come to appreciate its
preciousness.
Then we don't want to waste a minute. We want to enter
our lives
fully and use them in a responsible way. Death is a
good companion
on the road to living well and dying without regret.
Frank Ostaseski
The
Five Invitations
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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 |
Death
not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent
completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to
which all things human are subject.
Elizabeth Arden |
No
one who is fit to live need fear to die. . . . To us here,
death is the most terrible word we know. But when we
have tasted its reality, it will mean to us birth,
deliverance, a new creation of ourselves.
G.S. Merriam |
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Among our people, how we live and conduct
ourselves in the year
following the death of a loved one is very critical.
We believe that
how you are and how you behave and handle your emotions
during
that time is how you will be as a person for the rest of
your life. We
believe this because we know that all of life doesn't end
because one life did. Life goes on.
Joseph M. Marshall III |
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I am standing on the seashore. A
ship at my side spreads her white
sails
to the morning
breeze and starts for the blue ocean.
She is an
object
of beauty and strength. I stand and
watch her until at
length
she is only
a ribbon of white cloud just where the sea and sky come
to
mingle with
each other. There! She is gone! But
someone at my
side says, "Gone where?" From our sight, that is all. She is just as
large in
mast and hull and spar as
when she left our
side, and just
as able to bear her load of
living freight to
the place of destination.
Her diminished
size is in
us, not in her. Just at the
moment when you
say "There! She is gone!"
other voices
are ready to
take up the glad
shout: "There she
comes!" And that is what we call dying.
unattributed
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A
little girl lost a playmate in death and one day reported to
her family
that she had gone to comfort the sorrowing mother.
"What did you
say?" asked her father. "Nothing," she
replied. "I just
climbed up on her lap and cried with her."
Charles Swindoll
Killing Giants, Pulling Thorns |
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Death is
nothing at all. It does not count. I have only
slipped
away into the next room. Everything remains exactly as
it was.
I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so
fondly
together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to
each
other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar
name. Speak
of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no
difference
in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or
sorrow. Laugh
as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed
together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be
ever the
household word that it always was. Let it be spoken
without an
effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life
means all that
it ever meant. It is the same as it always was.
There is absolute
and unbroken continuity. What is death but a
negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but
waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near,
just round the corner. All is well.
Henry Scott Holland |
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I feel strongly that we've got to tell children
about death, and
stop protecting them and giving
them concepts that we are
immortal. We act
as if we believe that we are. Freud said a
lot of really nice things and one thing that he
said was so many
of our problems and our
inability to live stem from the belief
that we
will never die. We think we have
forever. If you think
about it in the back
of your mind, you always think it's the other
person who dies, not you. Well I have news
for you. We are all
going to
die! That is the most democratic thing
that has ever
happened. No matter who you
are, how wealthy you are, how
illustrious you
are, how many degrees you have, how fouled
up
you've made your life, you're going to die.
Leo Buscaglia
Living,
Loving, and Learning |
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If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you
what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this
job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.
Michel de Montaigne |
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There’s nothing awful about dying; the only awful thing
about dying is the things you leave unfinished.
Thornton Wilder
The Eighth Day |
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For most of us, the darkest spot we face in life is our death.
The fear
of the unknown leads us to lose our innocence. I say for most because,
for those who have lived with it, thought about it, and faced it, death
may even be the brightest spot of all. I was talking with some terminal
patients about life and its difficulties when one of them said, “Dying isn’t
the worst outcome,” and another, nodding in agreement, replied, “I can
survive dying.” Laughter filled the room. But the truth is we can.
Living is a lot harder than dying.
Bernie
Siegel
No Endings, Only Beginnings |
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