Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

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 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
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
Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you've lived.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Throughout life, we get clues that remind us of the direction we are supposed to be headed.... If you stay focused, then you learn your lessons.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The 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 Kübler-Ross
The ultimate lesson is learning how to love and be loved unconditionally.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
You have to temper the iron. Every hardship is an opportunity that you are given, an opportunity to grow. To grow is the sole purpose of existence on this planet Earth. You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you'll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do. You live your life in preparation for tomorrow or in remembrance of yesterday, and meanwhile, each today is lost.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The opinion which other people have of you is their problem, not yours.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
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 Kübler-Ross
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 have learned there is no joy without hardship. There is no pleasure without pain. Would we know the comfort of peace without the distress of war?

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive — to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a façade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
If you truly want to grow as a person and learn, you should realize that the universe has enrolled you in the graduate program of life, called loss.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
We bring a deeper commitment to our happiness when we fully understand, that our time left is limited and we really need to make it count.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassions, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive — a peculiar form of denial of our own mortality?

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
How do these geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans, know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within, if only we would listen to it, that tells us so certainly when to go forth into the unknown.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms, you will never see the beauty of their carvings.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
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 Kübler-Ross
We think sometimes we're only drawn to the good, but we're actually drawn to the authentic. We like people who are real more than those who hide their true selves under layers of artificial niceties

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
If you are ready for mystical experiences, you have them.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross