Elisabeth Kübler-Ross - Death Quotes

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

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

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
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