Death is staring too long into the burning sun and the relief of entering a cool, dark room.
Elisabeth Kubler-RossRead
Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you've lived.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fear of death is unnecessary, as the experience can be positive depending on one's life choices.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross suggests that dying itself should not invoke fear; rather, it can be a profound and beautiful experience if one has lived fully and authentically. The quality of one's life is what ultimately shapes our perception of death, indicating that a life well-lived transforms the inevitable end into something meaningful.
Themes
DeathLifeFearExperienceLivingPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of living fully, one might use this quote to emphasize embracing life.
More from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
All quotes βThe reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not "get over" the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.
Elisabeth Kubler-RossRead
The simple life on the farm was everything to me. Nothing was more relaxing after a long plane flight than to reach the winding driveway that led up to my house. The quiet of the night was more soothing than a sleeping pill.
Elisabeth Kubler-RossRead
The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.
Elisabeth Kubler-RossRead
There is no joy without hardship. If not for death, would we appreciate life? If not for hate, would we know the ultimate goal is love? At these moments you can either hold on to negativity and look for blame, or you can choose to heal and keep on loving.
Elisabeth Kubler-RossRead
We're put here on Earth to learn our own lessons. No one can tell you what your lessons are; it is part of your personal journey to discover them. On these journeys we may be given a lot, or just a little bit, of the things we must grapple with, but never more than we can handle.
Elisabeth Kubler-RossRead
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Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Vladimir NabokovRead
I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.
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Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
Jacques MaritainRead
Character - Some day, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.
Phillips BrooksRead