Death

"Fling but a stone, the giant dies."

"He pass'd the flaming bounds of place and time: The living throne, the sapphire blaze, Where angels tremble while they gaze, He saw; but blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night."

"Down to the dust! — and, as thou rott'st away, Even worms shall perish on thy poisonous clay."

"Cremation is preferable to burial as a way of disposing of corpses."

"Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can honour's voice provoke the silent dust, Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?"

"He had never feared the entity Death but was often afraid of dying."

"Oh, God! it is a fearful thing To see the human soul take wing In any shape, in any mood!"

"None who e'er knew her can believe her dead; Though, should she die, they deem it well might be Her spirit took its everlasting flight In summer's glory, by the sunset sea, That onward through the Golden Gate is fled. Ah, where that bright soul is cannot be night."

"What if thou be saint or sinner, Crooked gray-beard, straight beginner,— Empty paunch, or jolly dinner, When Death thee shall call. All alike are rich and richer, King with crown, and cross-legged stitcher, When the grave hides all."

"Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is pass'd in sleep."

"As inevitably as a drunkard must live in his repulsive soddened physical body here, so must he live in his equally repulsive astral body there. The harvest sown is reaped after its kind. Such is the law in all the worlds, and it may not be escaped. Nor indeed is the astral body there more revolting and horrible than it was when the man was living upon earth and made the atmosphere around him fetid with his astral emanations. But people on earth do not generally recognise its ugliness, being astrally blind. Further, we may cheer ourselves in contemplating these unhappy brothers of ours by remembering that their sufferings are but temporary, and are giving a much-needed lesson in the life of the soul. By the tremendous pressure of nature’s disregarded laws they are learning the existence of those laws, and the misery that accrues from ignoring them in life and conduct. The lesson they would not learn during earth-life, whirled away on the torrent of lusts and desires, is pressed on them here, and will be pressed on them in their succeeding lives, until the evils are eradicated and the man has risen into a better life. Nature’s lessons are sharp, but in the long run they are merciful, for they lead to the evolution of the soul and guide it to the winning of its immortality."

"It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other."

"To the man whom death’s wing has touched, what once seemed important is so no longer; and other things become so which once did not seem important or which he did not even know existed. The layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there.Henceforth this was what I sought to discover: the authentic being, “the old Adam” whom the Gospels no longer accepted; the man whom everything around me—books, teachers, family and I myself—had tried from the first to suppress. And I had already glimpsed him, faint, obscured by their encrustations, but all the more valuable, all the more urgent. I scorned henceforth that secondary, learned being whom education had pasted over him.And I would compare myself to a palimpsest; I shared the thrill of the scholar who beneath more recent script discovers. on the same paper, an infinitely more precious ancient text."

"Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation."

""Whom the gods love die young," was said of yore."

"Where the brass knocker, wrapt in flannel band, Forbids the thunder of the footman's hand, The' upholder, rueful harbinger of death, Waits with impatience for the dying breath."

"Dead as a door nail."

"Ah! surely nothing dies but something mourns!"

"Death is only a change that gives the soul a partial liberation, releasing him from the heaviest of his chains. It is but a birth into a wider life, a return after brief exile on earth to the soul's true home, a passing from a prison into the freedom of the upper air. Death is the greatest of earth's illusions; there is no death, but only changes in life-conditions. Life is continuous, unbroken, unbreakable; "unborn, eternal, ancient, constant," it perishes not with the perishing of the bodies that clothe it. We might as well think that the sky is falling when a pot is broken, as imagine that the soul perishes when the body falls to pieces."

"The prince who kept the world in awe, The judge whose dictate fix'd the law; The rich, the poor, the great, the small, Are levell'd; death confounds 'em all."

"To die is landing on some silent shore, Where billows never break nor tempests roar; Ere well we feel the friendly stroke 'tis o'er."

"Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown."

"Life's race well run, Life's work well done, Life's crown well won, Now comes rest."

"Had [Christ] the death of death to death Not given death by dying: The gates of life had never been To mortals open lying."

"Heaven gives its favourites — early death."

"The theory of Reincarnation, then, in the Esoteric Philosophy, asserts the existence of a living and individualised Principle, which dwells in and informs the body of a man, and Which, on the death of the body, passes into another body, after a longer or shorter interval. Thus successive bodily lives are linked together like pearls strung upon a thread, the thread being the living Principle, the pearls upon it the separate human lives... In the light of reincarnation life... becomes the school of the eternal Man within us, who seeks therein his development..."

"The Theosophical Explanation. We endorse the theory that the soul leaves the body; but we are perhaps a little more definite in our explanation of what we mean by the soul than are many religious people. Our statement is not that man possesses a soul, but that man is a soul, and that the body is merely a vestment which he casts off when it is worn out... Man is a far more complex being than to physical sight he appears to be; and the only way in which we can thoroughly understand him is by raising our consciousness to altogether higher planes, where we can see much more...[than] one who has not previously studied the subject. This benefit the Theosophical teaching at once confers on those who, from their study of philosophy in past lives, now find themselves able to accept it. It robs death forthwith of all its terror and much of its sorrow, and enables us to see it in its true proportions and to understand its place in the scheme of our evolution."

"Things of real worth, such as the mental life of the ant or the crab, fill psychological and scientific literature; but such a thing as death, which involves the whole human race more intimately than anything else possibly can-since all must die-is regarded as hardly worthy of serious discussion!"

"I can state from my own experience that what people fear in death is the loneliness of having to leave this world forever. Though people may not be consciously aware of all the phenomena around them under normal circumstances, the thought that that which makes them themselves will be lost forever is a terribly lonely thing."

"Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as harbingers to heaven; and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sicknesse broken body."

"Friend Ralph! thou hast Outrun the constable at last!"

"Human beings desire more than small pleasures in the routines of life. We also seek great challenges in the face of death."

"We may feel only anxious (or even sick) for a number of reasons which have no apparent connection with our conscience. [...] One form of this anxiety is the fear of death; not the normal fear of having to die which every human being experiences in the contemplation of death, but a horror of dying by which people can be possessed constantly. This irrational fear of death results from the failure of having lived; it is the expression of our guilty conscience for having wasted our life and missed the chance of productive use of our capacities. To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable."

": The fear of death is worse than death."

"Suicide is the deliberate or the hurried action of the man who is trying to get out of a trouble and escape from it. Yet he cannot escape from it. He has struck away his body, he is wide awake on the other side of death, exactly the same man he was a moment before, except that his body is thrown off; no more changed than if he had merely taken off his coat. The result of his losing the physical body is that his capacity for suffering is very much increased."

"Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life."

": The mountain is passed; now we shall get on better."

"Timor mortis morte pejor."

"La montagne est passée; nous irons mieux."

"I knew a man who once said, "Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.""

"We wonder if this can be really the close, Life's fever cooled by death's trance; And we cry, though it seems to our dearest of foes, "God give us another chance.""

"Death and dissolution are not penalties inflicted on the living; they are themselves the conditions necessary to the existence of life and they hold all the hope of the future, as they have from the start."

"If popular theology had not most unhappily altogether lost sight of the cardinal doctrine of reincarnation, its· views on this subject of death would naturally be entirely different. A man who realizes that he has died many times before regards the operation more philosophically than one who believes it to be an absolutely new experience fraught with all kinds of vague· and awful possibilities."

"A dying man can do nothing easy."

"Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!"

"They do neither plight nor wed In the city of the dead, In the city where they sleep away the hours."

"If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete."

"When you take the wires of the cage apart, you do not hurt the bird, but help it. You let it out of its prison. How do vou know that death does not help me when it takes the wires of my cage down? — that it does not release me, and put me into some better place, and better condition of life?"

"There is only rest and peace In the city of Surcease From the failings and the waitings 'neath the sun, And the wings of the swift years Beat but gently o'er the biers Making music to the sleepers every one."

"Dear brethren, our ship is sailing fast. We shall soon hear the rasping of the shallows, and the commotion overhead which bespeaks the port in view. When it comes to that, how will you feel? Are you a stranger, or a convict, or are you going home? Brethren, we are all sailing home; and by and by, when we are not thinking of it, some shadowy thing (men call it death), at midnight, will pass by, and will call us by name, and will say, "I have a message for you from home; God wants you; heaven waits for you.""