quotes, quotations and passages on death

To die in such a way that death is a
fitting end to one's life is not an easy art.

Ilya Ehrenberg

People who have seen life and death as just an unbroken continuum, the swinging of an eternal pendulum, have been able to move as freely into death as they walked through life. Socrates went to the grave almost perplexed by his companions' tears. Many of the Zen masters actually anticipated their "final" hour, meeting it with equilibrium and even laughter. Philip Kapleau The Wheel of Death

As Roshi Taji, a contemporary Zen master, approached death, his senior disciples assembled at his bedside. One of them, remembering the Roshi was fond of a certain kind of cake, had spent half a day searching the pastry shops of Tokyo for this confection which he now presented to Roshi Taji. With a wan smile the dying man accepted a piece of the cake and slowly began munching it. As he grew weaker his disciples inquired whether he had any final words for them. "Yes," the Roshi replied. The disciples leaned closer to catch his words of wisdom. "Please tell us!" "My, but this cake is delicious," and with that he died. unattributed

Death seems to me so often a relief, a rendering up of responsibility, a quitting of many vexatious trifles. Ralph Waldo Emerson Journal

How beautiful this dead leaf, yellow and bright red, a leaf from the autumn. So simple in its death, so lovely, full of beauty and vitality of the whole tree and summer. Strange that it has not withered. . . . Why do human beings die so miserably? . . . Why don't they die-- as beautifully as this leaf? J. Krishnamurti Last journal

Death is the most universal and inexorable of
the demands that is made on us human beings.

Albert Kaplan
Love. . . and Death

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Any act you perform may be your last. The only thing that counts is
that you perform your absolute best in anything you do, because it
may very well be the last thing you do. . . . Is this the act that I would
want if it were to be my final act on earth, is a question that will drop
more pettiness and idiocy from your life than almost anything else.

David Copeland
"Opening to the Whispers of Power"

I have never doubted that we could rise, calmly, healthfully, naturally,
into a sensuous perception as far richer and more satisfying than the
best of our present level, as that best is beyond the perception
of the dullard or the animal.

Mary Johnston
Added Space

Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet.
Let it not be a death but completeness.
Let love melt into memory and pain into songs.
Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of wings over the nest.
Let the last touch of your hand be gentle like the flower of the night.
Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence.
I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.

Rabindranath Tagore
The Gardner

On the day when death will knock at your door, what will you
offer to him? I will set before my guest the full vessel of my life;
I will never let him go with empty hands. All the sweet vintage
of all my autumn days and summer nights, all the earnings and
gleanings of my busy life will I place before him at the close of
my days, when death will knock at my door.

My delight in death is far, far greater then
The delights of traders at making vast fortunes at sea,
Or the lords of the gods who vaunt their victories in battle;
Or of those sages who have entered the rapture of perfect absorption.
So just as a traveler who set out on the road when the time has come to go,
I will not remain in this world any longer,
But will go to dwell in the stronghold of the great bliss of deathlessness.
This, my life, is finished, my karma is exhausted.
What benefits prayers could bring has worn out.
All the worldly things are done with.
This life's show is over.
In one instant I will recognize the very essence of the manifestation of my being
In the pure, vast realms of the bardo states.
I am close now to taking up my seat in the ground of primordial perfection.

The Tibetan Longchenpas

(Bardo is a Tibetan word referring to what we experience in the period between death and rebirth; however, more generally, the word may refer to the gap or space we experience between any two states.)

As for death, if there is nothing beyond, then for nothingness
I offer thanks; if another mode of existence, with the old worn-out
husk of a body left behind, this floundering, muddled mind given
a longer range and a new precision, then for that I likewise offer thanks.

Malcolm Muggeridge
"Half in Love with Death"

So far as the creative individual goes, life and death are of equal value;
it is all a question of counterpoint. What is of vital concern, however, is
how and where one meets life-- or death. Life can be more deadly than
death, and death, on the other hand, can open up the road to life.

Henry Miller
The Cosmological Eye

Proceed, then, clear-eyed and laughing. Go to greet Death as a friend.

Rupert Brooke
"Second Best"

Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the only
one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as its
highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a form of
life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look upon it with the
same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind will be accompanied
to the steps of the tomb with the same glad expectation as greets a birth.

Maurice Maeterlinck
Our Eternity

Life and death are but phases of the same thing, the reverse and
obverse of the same coin. Death is as necessary for people's
growth as life itself.

Mohandas Gandhi

To see through the eyes of the mountain eagle, the view of
realization, is to look down on a landscape in which the boundaries
that we imagined existed between life and death shade into each
other and dissolve. . . . What we, in our ignorance, call "life," and
what we, in our ignorance, call "death," are merely different
aspects of that wholeness and movement.

Sogyal Rinpoche
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Why cheat ourselves with words so vague as life and death?
What is the difference? At most, the entrance in and the
departure from one scene in our wide career. How many scenes
are left to us! We do but hasten our journey, not close it.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Godolphin

Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life.
Death is the unknown in which all of us have lived before birth.

Alan Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity

Death is as natural and necessary as birth, and it is no more
mysterious. Death is only change, a necessary incident of the
continuous life of the world. Bad as is our social state, it is easy
to see that if death did not cut off the unfit, the world would be
filled with nothing but misery. When the house of the flesh becomes
so worn or so diseased as to be beyond repair, life pulls it down and
rebuilds afresh: that is what we call death.

Bolton Hall
The Halo of Grief

We cannot suppose that death is the end of any adventure
except that of the body. . . . There will be things yet to be done,
and the stuff that we work in will be the utterly familiar and
still mysterious and exciting stuff of ourselves.

Mary Austin
Experiences Facing Death

Death is the final stage of growth in this life. There is no total death.
Only the body dies. The self or spirit, or whatever you may wish
to label it, is eternal.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Death: The Final Stage of Growth

We cannot say that death is not a good. We do not
know whether the grave is the end of this life, or
the door of another, or whether the night here is
not somewhere else a dawn.

Robert Ingersoll
Why I Am an Agnostic

This world is not conclusion;
    A sequel stands beyond,
Invisible, as music,
    But positive, as sound.
It beckons and it baffles;
    Philosophies don't know,
And through a riddle, at the last,
    Sagacity must go.
To guess it puzzles scholars;
    To gain it, men have shown
Contempt of generations,
    And crucifixion known.

Emily Dickinson

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Death is the supreme form of life. . . . We must accept our own
death, and the deaths of others, as a natural part of life.

Marguerite Yourcenar
With Open Eyes

It is the spirit that tires of its earthly habitation, that wearies
of the cramping limitations of the house of flesh; and in
proportion as it struggles to draw itself away, the vital
forces of the body are weakened, the subconscious that
guides its myriad functions is affected and disturbed,
until at last the final separation takes place, and the body
is cast off, its purpose accomplished--even as the serpent
casts off its skin.

Eva Martin
The Secret of a Star

I know that the day will come when my sight of this earth shall
be lost, and life will take its leave in silence, drawing the last
curtain over my eyes. Yet stars will watch at night, and morning
rise as before and hours heave like sea waves casting up
pleasures and pains. When I think of this end of my moments,
the barrier of the moments breaks and I see by the light of death
thy world with it careless treasures. Rare is its
lowliest seat, rare its meanest of lives.

Rabindranath Tagore
Gitanjali

Articles and book excerpts on death:

The Fourth Tuesday: We Talk about Death Mitch Albom
The Hardest Choices tom walsh

Death is much simpler than birth; it is merely a continuation.
Birth is the mystery, not death.

Stewart Edward White
The Unobstructed Universe

The assumption that nothing preceded birth or follows death
is largely taken for granted in the West. . . . Such an assertion
rests on the blind assumption, in its own way an act of faith,
that life, of all things in the universe, operates in a vacuum. It
asks us to believe that this one phenomenon, the invigoration
of supposedly inert matter, springs out of nowhere and just as
miraculously disappears without a trace.

Philip Kapleau
The Wheel of Death

Turn which way we will, we find no "killing principle" in Nature, only a
vitalising and sustaining one. Throughout its extent, Nature is life, in
all forms and modifications--one vast and infinite life, subject no doubt
to the extinction of particular phenomena, but never to absolute total
death, even in its weakest and least of things. Anything that looks like
death is a token and certificate of life being about to start anew. Death
and life are but the struggle of life itself to attain a higher form.

C.H. Bjerragaard
The Great Mother

What we commonly call death to people is not death at all,
but only a change of the energy of life into another form, where
it may still exist, albeit in different circumstances and operating
through and upon different kinds of instrumentality. . . . Life,
being a form of force, or energy, of something greater than
mere physical force or energy, can never wholly cease to be.
Therefore "death" is not the end of life, but only a change whereby
it continues actively in another form.

Jon P. Halsey
The Evidence for Immortality

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

If death could be seen as a beautiful clear lake, refreshing and
buoyant, then when a consciousness moves towards its exit
from a body there would be that delightful plunge and it would
simply swim away.

Pat Rodegast and Judith Stanton
Emmanuel's Book

Nobody knows that death stays the development of the individual.
It stays our perception of it; but so does distance, absence, or even
sleep. Birth gives to each of us much; death may give more, in the
way of subtler senses to behold colors we cannot now see; to catch
sounds which we do not now hear; and to be aware of bodies and
objects impalpable at present to us, but perfectly real.

Edwin Arnold
Death and Afterwards

I feel and know that death is not the ending, as we thought,
but rather the real beginning-- and that nothing ever is or
can be lost, nor even die, nor soul, nor matter.

Walt Whitman
Democratic Vistas

The thought of death leaves me in perfect peace, for I have a firm
conviction that our spirit is a being of indestructible nature. It
works from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun, which though
it seems to set in our mortal eyes does not really set,
but shines on perpetually.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination.
Try to visualize a world without death! Death is the
essential condition of life, not an evil.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

death - death 2 - death 3

When I depart, I cast no look behind, since life and death in cycles
come and go. Life follows upon death. Death is the beginning of
life. Who knows when the end is reached? . . . If then life and death
are but consecutive states, what need have I to complain?

Chuang Tzu

Death is no threat to people who are not afraid to die.

Lao Tzu

There is a usefulness of time when a person should go, and not
occupy too long the ground to which others have the right to advance.

Thomas Jefferson