Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Live, so you do not have to look back and say: "God, how I have wasted my life."

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Every individual human being born on this earth has the capacity to become a unique and special person, unlike any who has ever existed before or ever will exist again.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
You may not get what you want, but God always gives you what you need.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
What happens in a changing field of medicine, where we have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering?

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
I believe every person has a guardian spirit or angel. They assist us in the transition between life and death and they also help us pick our parents before we are born.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
We are living in a time of uncertainty, anxiety, fear, and despair. It is essential that you become aware of the light, power, and strength within each of you, and that you learn to use those inner resources in service of your own and others' growth.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever. If you live each day of your life right, then you have nothing to fear.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
There are dreams of love, life, and adventure in all of us. But we are also sadly filled with reasons why we shouldn't try. These reasons seem to protect us, but in truth they imprison us. They hold life at a distance. Life will be over sooner than we think. If we have bikes to ride and people to love, now is the time.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? Five years? Forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
If, on the other hand, you listen to your own inner voice, to your own inner wisdom, which is far greater than anyone else's as far as you are concerned, you will not go wrong, and you will know what to do with your life. Then time is no longer relevant.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Dying is an integral part of life, as natural and predictable as being born. But whereas birth is cause for celebration, death has become a dreaded and unspeakable issue to be avoided by every means possible in our modern society. Perhaps it is that.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Old age is not synonymous with being 'glad to die.'

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
It is my conviction that it is the intuitive, spiritual aspects of us humans-the inner voice-that gives us the 'knowing,' the peace, and the direction to go through the windstorms of life, not shattered but whole, joining in love and understanding.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Death is but a transition from this life to another existence where there is no more pain and anguish. All the bitterness and disagreements will vanish, and the only thing that lives forever is love.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Our only purpose in life is growth. There are no accidents.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Dying nowadays is more gruesome in many ways, namely, more lonely, mechanical, and dehumanized; at times it is even difficult to determine technically when the time of death has occurred.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
We make progress in society only if we stop cursing and complaining about its shortcomings and have the courage to do something about them.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Death is simply a shedding of the physical body, like the butterfly coming out of a cocoon.... It's like putting away your winter coat when spring comes.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth — and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up — that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
When we have passed the tests we are sent to Earth to learn, we are allowed to graduate. We are allowed to shed our body, which imprisons our souls.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross