Best 741 quotes in «death and dying quotes» category

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence . . .

I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

I think that nothing teaches you more about life than death and dying.

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

Sleep - death without dying - living, but not life.

Life is stressful,dear. That's why they say "rest in peace.

You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.

A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.

A candle without a spark, a sky without a sun, the look people get when they cease to be people, start being bodies.

¿Acaso un artista puede amar tanto su trabajo que, si piensa que su obra no tiene vida, tampoco él quiere tenerla ya?

We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them; It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps, And here you are the mother’s laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues! And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? What do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprouts show there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceased the moment life appeared. All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Achala, worrying and scheming about your next life, before you have even completed this one, is not a good practice." Rinpoche

A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.

A death without being a loss to anybody is the most unworthy death.

After you die, a rare friend or family member may carry your memory throughout life. Most will forget you. As if you were never here.

After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not 'bury' us. We buried him. Neville Chute's On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Clash of 79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millennium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire? Is it not possible that today's most populous nations -China, India, and Indonesia- could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying.

Ageing is the ultimate death.

A girl about her own age reached out and took hold of her hand. The girl was tall and thin. She had long black hair streaked with red, and the whites of her green eyes stood out against the black coal dust that covered her face. Her blue and white dress hung in tatters, and was blackened by coal dust and smeared with blood. The girl smiled and Rosie could see that in her other hand she was holding her red umbrella.

A gente só briga com a morte quando não fez nada na vida.

Ah yes, a great victory, this 'sport'. I am sure El Toro appreciates the applause Jumping in the Puddles of Life

560My mother went on and on about it. Actually she went off on a tangent, I told her about your mother at one point and she went all (H starts doing a lightly French accent) it is not fair for your friend, she is not going to get the important boredoms and mournings and melancholies that are her due and are owing to her just from being the age that she is, for now it will be interrupted by real mournings and real melancholies...

All the same I fear what happens when we expand the terrain of medical practice to include actively assisting people with speeding their death. I am less worried about the abuse of these powers than I am about dependence on them.

All things end. They rarely end as we would like them to and often do so before we are ready. We transition in a way that gives our loss honor; we grieve with a love and true appreciation for what we have no longer. It was clear that my mom was ready to go; it was her time. My love of her and my desperation to keep her in my life were of no consequence to that fact, any more than my relentless attempts to improve The Lyon's Den kept it from cancellation. Both personally and professionally I was swamped with the message: Your plan pales compared to the larger one.

Although it's great to appear to a feast, home is always sweet, though it may be lonely and cold like death

A man dies and his skin loses heat like the sand on a summer evening. It makes you feel like warming him up.

A man dies, girl, he isn't any more, least not down here. Respect and all that crap doesn't deserve the dead; it just makes the living feel better. The dead one, maybe he is somewhere else-- maybe all he needs to be somewhere else is to believe he will be somewhere else. I won't deny a man his belief, and I don't know any more'n you about souls and all that stuff. But I know this: Speaking good or bad about something that isn't anymore is a bloody waste of time. I can't feature Saint Peter sitting up there saying: 'Hey, Adam, there's folks bad-mouthing you down there. What'd you do to merit that?

Amongst all his efforts, the most and actually the only meaningful effort of man is his efforts to defeat the death!

All deaths are sudden, no matter how gradual the dying may be.

And a ride in a hearse tells us we’re all close to that final cruise . . . when the body dies and we move on. It’s just the body, man. It’s just the body. The soul’s already gone. So don’t be afraid of a dead body absent a soul. It’s empty, man. No resident. What you need to worry about is a living body that’s lost its soul. Now that is scary, man.” - Funk N. Wagnalls, owner of the Grim Reapers auto lot, a character in Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues.

An African who loses the ability to die with dignity is a lost man.

An acceptable death is a death which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors. It has its antithesis: ‘the embarrassingly graceless dying,’ which embarrasses the survivors because it causes too strong an emotion to burst forth; and emotions must be avoided both in the hospital and everywhere in society. One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly.

And a funeral, I found out, is like a wedding in reverse, with less time to plan.

And do you know the story about Haydn’s head? They cut it away from the still-warm cadaver so some insane scientist could take apart the brain and pinpoint the location of musical genius. And the Einstein Story? He’d carefully written his will with instructions to cremate him. They followed his orders, but his disciple, ever loyal and devoted, refused to live without the master’s gaze on him. Before the cremation, he took the eyes of the cadaver and put them in a bottle of alcohol to keep them watching him until the moment he should die himself. That’s why I said that the crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It’s the only absolute death. And I don’t want any other. Jean-Marc, I want an absolute death.

And our love goes beyond flesh; it transcends Death's reminder. In the Underworld Library, two books sharing a binder

Amid all that blood of the dying sun, the verde was still alive.

And the camel driver had said, to die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one's departure from this world.

And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself.

...and when we die we die alone I cry, I cry alone Like a piece of stone I am thrown into the wavy ocean of life to atone...to atone Only to atone...

And then I feel guilty, because I know all these offers are made in vain. I know I cannot get my mother back healthy for a day. ... My mom is sick, sick and dying, and no bargaining will change that. And it's in all the books, bargaining, which makes me embarrassed. Look at me grieving my textbook grief. - 150

An old Celtic proverb boldly places death right at the center of life. ‘Death is the middle of a long life,’ they used to say. Ancient people did things like that; they put death at the center instead of casting it out of sight and leaving such an important subject until the last possible moment. Of course, they lived close to nature and couldn’t help but see how the forest grew from fallen trees and how death seemed to replenish life from fallen members. Only the unwise and the overly fearful think that death is the blind enemy of life.

And where does that minute go, that minute that separates life from death? I want those sixty seconds back.

And what after all, is death?? 'Tis but a cessation from mortal life; 'tis but the finishing of an appointed course; the refreshing inn after a fatiguing journey; the end of a life of cares and troubles; and, if happy, the beginning of a life of immortal happiness.

Anything man can make, man can destroy.

A person's destiny often ends before his death.

Are you afraid to die? 'Cause it scares the hell outta me, And the end is all I can see, And it scares the hell outta me, That the end is all I can see.

Are you scared?” “Of what?” “Dying.” Jemma was nothing, if she was not blunt. “I’m not expecting to die, Jemma. I’m expecting to have treatment, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, whatever it takes, but I’m expecting to come through this.

As a child of the Seventies, I grew up thinking that death could be as light as a feather or as heavy as a mountain. Lolo’s death sailed over the rooftop of the world.

As a newborn baby each of us was helpless and, without the care and kindness we received then, we would not have survived. Because the dying are also unable to help themselves, we should relieve them of discomfort and anxiety, and assist them, as far as we can, to die with composure.