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..."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"So we fall asleep in Jesus. We have played long enough at the games of life, and at last we feel the approach of death. We are tired out, and we lay our heads back on the bosom of Christ, and quietly fall asleep."

"And when no longer we can see Thee, may we reach out our hands, and find Thee leading us through death to immortality and glory."

"To the Christian, these shades are the golden haze which heaven's light makes, when it meets the earth, and mingles with its shadows."

"What a power has Death to awe and hush the voices of this earth! How mute we stand when that presence confronts us, and we look upon the silence he has wrought in a human life! We can only gaze, and bow our heads, and creep with our broken, stammering utterances under the shelter of some great word which God has spoken, and in which we see through the history of human sorrow the outstretching and overshadowing of the eternal arms."

"But whether on the scaffold high, Or in the battle's van, The fittest place where man can die Is where he dies for man."

"To die would be an awfully big adventure."

"No man escapes Death. So Death must not be the enemy. Life must not be the prize. It must be the gameboard, on which Death teaches its savage lessons. You could heed those lessons, or ignore them, but never evade them. Death, then, was the ally. Not to be sought, but heeded."

"When we come to die, we shall be alone. From all our worldly possessions we shall be about to part. Worldly friends — the friends drawn to us by our position, our wealth, or our social qualities, — will leave us as we enter the dark valley. From those bound to us by stronger ties — our kindred, our loved ones, children, brothers, sisters, and from those not less dear to us who have been made our friends because they and we are the friends of the same Saviour, — from them also we must part. Yet not all will leave us. There is One who "sticketh closer than a brother" — One who having loved His own which are in the world loves them to the end."

"It is only the dead who do not return."

"To me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe — such a great universe, and so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible — and eternal, so that come what may to my 'Soul,' my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part — I shall still have some sort of a finger in the pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me — but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you."

"So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o'er; So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore."

"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have."

"There is no harm in patience, and no profit in lamentation. Death is easier to bear (than) that which precedes it, and more severe than that which comes after it. Remember the death of the Apostle of God, and your sorrow will be lessened."

"The death-change comes. Death is another life. We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straight Another golden chamber of the king's, Larger than this we leave, and lovelier. And then in shadowy glimpses, disconnect, The story, flower-like, closes thus its leaves. The will of God is all in all. He makes, Destroys, remakes, for His own pleasure, all."

"Death is the universal salt of states; Blood is the base of all things — law and war."

"Life hath more awe than death."

"Much good will be brought about through the growing custom to cremate those forms which the indwelling life has vacated; when it is an universal custom, we shall see a definite minimising of disease, leading to longevity and increased vitality. p. 249 If delay is necessary from family feeling or municipal requirements, cremation should follow death within thirty-six hours; where no reason for delay exists, cremation can be rightly permitted in twelve hours. It is wise, however, to wait twelve hours in order to ensure true death. p.485"

"The problem of death or the art of dying. This is something which all seriously ill people must inevitably face, and for which those in good health should prepare themselves, through correct thinking and sane anticipation. The morbid attitude of the majority of men to the subject of death, and their refusal to consider it when in good health, is something which must be altered and deliberately changed. Christ demonstrated to His disciples the correct attitude, when referring to His coming and immediate decease at the hand of His enemies; He chided them when they evidenced sorrow... The fear and the morbidness which the subject of death usually evokes, and the unwillingness to face it with understanding, are due to the emphasis which people lay upon the fact of the physical body, and the facility with which they identify themselves with it; it is based also upon an innate fear of loneliness, and the loss of the familiar. ... After death... the man finds on the other side of the veil those whom he knows, and who have been connected with him in physical plane life, and he is never alone as human beings understand loneliness; he is also conscious of those still in physical bodies; he can see them, he can tune in on their emotions, and also upon their thinking, for the physical brain, being non-existent, no longer acts as a deterrent."

"Another fear which induces mankind to regard death as a calamity, is one which theological religion has inculcated, particularly the Protestant fundamentalists, and the Roman Catholic Church - the fear of hell, the imposition of penalties, usually out of all proportion to the errors of a life-time, and the terrors imposed by an angry God. To these man is told he will have to submit, and from them there is no escape, except through the vicarious atonement. There is, as you well know, no angry God, no hell, and no vicarious atonement. There is only a great principle of love animating the entire universe... As these erroneous ideas die out, the concept of hell will fade from man's recollection, and its place will be taken by an understanding of the law which makes each man work out his own salvation upon the physical plane, which leads him to right the wrongs which he may have perpetrated in his lives on Earth, and which enables him eventually to "clean his own slate"."

"With that inner conviction (of immortality), we face death, and we know that we shall live again, that we come and we go, and that we persist because we are... the controllers of our own destiny. We know that we have set ourselves a goal, and that the goal is "Life more abundantly" - somewhere, here, there, and eventually everywhere... The spirit in man is undying; it forever endures, progressing from point to point, and stage to stage upon the Path of Evolution, unfolding steadily and sequentially the divine attributes and aspects... The immortality of the human soul, and the innate ability of the spiritual, inner man to work out his own salvation under the Law of Rebirth, in response to the Law of Cause and Effect, are the underlying factors governing all human conduct and all human aspiration. They condition him at all times, until he has achieved the desired and the designed perfection, and can manifest on earth as a rightly functioning son of God."

"Death, as the human consciousness understands it, pain and sorrow, loss and disaster, joy and distress, are only such because man, as yet, identifies himself with the life of the form and not with the life and consciousness of the soul..."

"The young forget, and rightly forget, the inevitability of that final symbolic detachment which we call Death. But when life has played its part, and age has taken its toll of interests and strength, the tired and world-weary man has no fear of the detaching process, and seeks not to hold on to that which earlier was desired. He welcomes death, and relinquishes willingly that which earlier engrossed his attention."

"I speak about Death as one who knows... There is no death. There is... entrance into fuller life. There is freedom from the handicaps of the fleshly vehicle. The rending process so much dreaded does not exist, except in the cases of violent and of sudden death, and then the only true disagreeables are an instant and overwhelming sense of imminent peril and destruction, and something closely approaching an electric shock. No more... For the average good citizen, death is a continuance of the living process in his consciousness and a carrying forward of the interests and tendencies of the life. His consciousness and his sense of awareness are the same and unaltered. He does not sense much difference, is well taken care of, and oft is unaware that he has passed through the episode of death. For the wicked and cruelly selfish, for the criminal and for those few who live for the material side only, there eventuates that condition which we call "earth-bound". The links they have forged with earth and the earthward bias of all their desires, force them to remain close to the earth and their last setting in the earth environment. They seek desperately and by every possible means to re-contact it and to re-enter. In a few cases, great personal love for those left behind or the non-fulfilment of a recognised and urgent duty, holds the good and beautiful in a somewhat similar condition."

"The next two hundred years will see the abolition of death, as we now understand that great transition, and the establishing of the soul's existence. The soul will be known as an entity, as the motivating impulse, and the spiritual centre back of all manifested forms. . . . Our essential immortality will be demonstrated and realised to be a fact in nature."

"What then remains, but that we still should cry Not to be born, or being born to die."

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

"Reflect on death as in Jesus Christ, not as without Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ it is dreadful, it is alarming, it is the terror of nature. In Jesus Christ it is fair and lovely, it is good and holy, it is the joy of saints."

"Death ends a life, but not a relationship. Those memories, I think, linger in love. These honored dead have returned to the love that created them, and we miss their faces that we’ll see no more. Yet, we know at the deepest level of our being that something of who they were, and are now, endures at a whole new dimension of reality. And our true nature is to trust and embrace both life and death. As Thornton Wilder once wrote, 'There is a land of the living and the land of the dead, and the only bridge is love, the only survivor, the only meaning.'"

"Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose."

"Death comes to all. His cold and sapless hand Waves o'er the world, and beckons us away. Who shall resist the summons?"

"O lady, he is dead and gone! Lady, he's dead and gone! And at his head a green grass turfe, And at his heels a stone."

"For death betimes is comfort, not dismay, And who can rightly die needs no delay."

"Earl of Sandwich: 'Pon my honor, Wilkes, I don't know whether you'll die on the gallows or of the pox. John Wilkes: That must depend my Lord, upon whether I first embrace your Lordship's principles, or your Lordship's mistresses."

"Nam vita morti propior est quotidie."

": For life is nearer every day to death."

"Look forward a little further to the period when all the noise and tumult and business of this world shall have closed forever."

"Quem dii diligunt, Adolescens moritur, dum valet, sentit, sapit."

": He whom the gods love dies young, whilst he is full of health, perception, and judgment."

"Omnibus a suprema die eadem, quæ ante primum; nec magis a morte sensus ullus aut corpori aut animæ quam ante natalem."

": His last day places man in the same state as he was before he was born; nor after death has the body or soul any more feeling than they had before birth."

"De mortuis nil nisi bonum."

": Concerning the dead nothing but good shall be spoken."

"Come! let the burial rite be read— The funeral song be sung!— An anthem for the queenliest dead That ever died so young— A dirge for her, the doubly dead In that she died so young."

"Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero the Conqueror Worm."

"See my lips tremble and my eyeballs roll, Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul!"

"O Death, all eloquent! you only prove What dust we dote on, when 'tis man we love."