Quotes on Dying

Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

You would know the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heath of life? The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one. For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?

You want to live-but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying-and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?

Plan for this world as if you expect to live forever; but plan for the hereafter as if you expect to die tomorrow.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

How gladly would I meet mortality, my sentence, and be earth in sensible! How glad would lay me down, as in my mother's lap! There I should rest, and sleep secure.

The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?

Death is nothing to fear. It is only another dimension.

The tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony.

Every morning when I wake up, now, I regard it as having another borrowed day.

It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination.

Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

The worst evil of all is to leave the ranks of the living before one dies.

The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.

Life and death appear more certainly ours than whatsoever else; and yet hardly can that be called ours, which comes without our knowledge, and goes without it.

You never know what life means till you die; even throughout life, tis death that makes life live.

Why, do you not know, then, that the origin of all human evils, and of baseness, and cowardice, is not death, but rather the fear of death?