Quotations

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.

C. G. Jung (Swiss psychotherapist and psychiatrist)

Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make, not only for our own happiness, but that of the world at large.

Mohandas Gandhi (Preeminent leader of Indian nationalism in British-ruled India

You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die.

Cicely Saunders (Anglican nurse, social worker, physician and writer).

When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.

Morrie Schwartz (American educator and writer)

Do not fear death... only the unlived life. You don't have to live forever; You just have to live.

Natalie Babbitt (American author and illustrator of children’s books).

A strong life force can be seen in physical vitality, courage, competent judgment, self-mastery, sexual vigor, and the realization of each persons unique talents and purpose in life. To maintain a powerful life force, forget yourself, forget about living and dying, and bring your full attention into this moment.

Unknown quote

One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.

Morris West (Australian novelist and playwright).

[As quoted in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche]

Impermanence

There is no place on earth where death cannot find us — even if we constantly twist our heads about in all directions as in a dubious and suspect land . . . . If there were any way of sheltering from death’s blows — I am not the man to recoil from it . . . . But it is madness to think that you can succeed . . .
Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come — to them, their wives, their children, their friends — catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair! . . .
To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death . . . . We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

Michel de Montaigne (One of the most influential writers of the French renaissance).

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Gwendolyn Brooks (an American poet).

In morals, Theosophy builds its teachings on the unity, seeing in each form the expression of a common life, and therefore the fact that what injures one injures all. To do evil i.e., to throw poison into the life-blood of humanity, is a crime against the unity.

Annie Besant (a prominent Theosophist, socialist, women's rights activist, writer and orator and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule).