Death

"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" - and find that there is no death. p. 34"

"Conscious Death. Apart from dreamless sleep... there is one other involuntary portal. It opens up briefly at the time of physical death. Even if you have missed all the other opportunities for spiritual realization during your lifetime, one last portal will open up for you immediately after the body has died. There are countless accounts by people who had a visual impression of this portal as radiant light and then returned from what is commonly known as a near-death experience. Many of them also spoke of a sense of blissful serenity and deep peace... This portal opens up only very briefly, and unless you have already encountered the dimension of the Unmanifested in your lifetime, you will likely miss it. Most people carry too much residual resistance, too much fear, too much attachment to sensory experience, too much identification with the manifested world. So they see the portal, turn away in fear, and then lose consciousness. Most of what happens after that is involuntary and automatic. Eventually, there will be another round of birth and death. p. 91"

"Approaching death and death itself, the dissolution of the physical form, is always a great opportunity for spiritual realization. This opportunity is tragically missed most of the time, since we live in a culture that is almost totally ignorant of death, as it is almost totally ignorant of anything that truly matters. Every portal is a portal of death, the death of the false self. When you go through it, you cease to derive your identity from your psychological, mind-made form. You then realize that death is an illusion, just as your identification with form was an illusion. The end of illusion - that's all that death is. It is painful only as long as you cling to illusion. p. 92"

"Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?"

"Those who are lighthearted remind me of death."

"Our soul’s perfection is our life’s purpose; any other purpose, keeping death in mind, has no substance."

"The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others."

"The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing room defusing an unpleasant odor) and this was done by that very decorum which he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position"

"It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending."

"He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself—all that for which he had lived—and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death."

"I believe if I should die, And you should kiss my eyelids where I lie Cold, dead, and dumb to all the world contains, The folded orbs would open at thy breath, And from its exile in the Isles of Death Life would come gladly back along my veins."

"[P]eople are afraid – more afraid of the state – than of dying."

"So what if a kid dies? God will take care of him."

"Death is so preoccupied with life, that is has no time for anything else."

"“Death is never dignified.” O’Doull spoke with a doctor’s certainty. “Never. Dignity in death is something we invent afterwards to make the living feel better.”"

"Say the report is exaggerated."

"And God said, "A way must be conceived to pursue the dead beyond the tomb.""

"Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death."

"If a man despises the applause of the crowd of today, it is because he seeks to survive in renewed minorities for generations. "Posterity is an accumulation of minorities," said Gounod. He wishes to prolong himself in time rather than in space. The crowd soon overthrows its own idols and the statue lies broken at the foot of the pedestal without anyone heeding it; but those who win the hearts of the elect will long be the objects of a fervent worship in some shrine, small and secluded no doubt, but capable of preserving them from the flood of oblivion."

"No one says in the morning: A day is soon past, let us wait for the night. ... Yet what we cannot be certain of for an hour, we sometimes feel assured of for life, and say: “If death is the end of everything, why give ourselves so much trouble?""

"Go thou, deceased, to this earth which is a mother, and spacious and kind. May her touch be soft like that of wool, or a young woman, and may she protect thee from the depths of destruction. Rise above him, O Earth, do not press painfully on him, give him good things, give him consolation, as a mother covers her child with her cloth, cover thou him."

"Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus."

": The supreme day has come and the inevitable hour."

"Vixi, et quem dederat cursum fortuna, peregi: Et nunc magna mei sub terras currit imago."

": I have lived, and I have run the course which fortune allotted me; and now my shade shall descend illustrious to the grave."

"Irreameabilis unda."

": The wave from which there is no return [the river Styx]."

"Usque adeone mori miserum est?"

": Is it then so sad a thing to die?"

"Decet imperatorem stantem mori."

": It becomes an emperor to die standing (i.e. "in harness")."

"C'est demain, ma belle amie, que je fais le saut perilleux."

": It is today, my dear, that I take a perilous leap."

"Le lâche fuit en vain; la mort vole à sa suite: C'est en la défiant que le brave l'évite."

": It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

"Every man dies. Not every man really lives."

"But God, who is able to prevail, wrestled with him, as the angel did with Jacob, and marked him; marked him for his own."

"Softly his fainting head he lay Upon his Maker's breast; His Maker kiss'd his soul away, And laid his flesh to rest."

"Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound."

"The tall, the wise, the reverend head, Must lie as low as ours."

"One may live as a conqueror, a king, or a magistrate; but he must die as a man."

"I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits."

"I saw him now going the way of all flesh."

"I rejoice in the presence of death because I think it’s what makes life brilliant and beautiful. And without it, the world would be ridiculous. I’m interested in it from every point of view. My interest in it has not dimmed with its approach."

"Like Moses to thyself convey, And kiss my raptur'd soul away."

"Mysterious Night! When our first parent knew Thee from report Divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus, with the host of heaven came; And lo! creation widened in man's view. Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O sun? or who could find, While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed, That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind? Why do we then shun death with anxious strife? If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"

"Joy, shipmate, joy (Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry,) Our life is closed, our life begins, The long, long anchorage we leave, The ship is clear at last, she leaps! Joy, shipmate, joy!"

"O, I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as day cannot, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death."