"But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet; And Death is beautiful as feet of friend Coming with welcome at our journey's end."

"That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even Death may die."

": I imagined it was more difficult to die."

"J'avais cru plus difficile de mourir."

"Were a star quenched on high, For ages would its light, Still travelling downward from the sky, Shine on our mortal sight. So when a great man dies, For years beyond our ken, The light he leaves behind him lies Upon the paths of men."

"Then fell upon the house a sudden gloom, A shadow on those features fair and thin; And softly, from the hushed and darkened room, Two angels issued, where but one went in."

"Oh, what hadst thou to do with cruel Death, Who wast so full of life, or Death with thee, That thou shouldst die before thou hadst grown old!"

"There is no flock, however watched and tended, But one dead lamb is there! There is no fireside howsoe'er defended, But has one vacant chair."

"There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call Death."

"There is a Reaper whose name is Death, And with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that grow between."

"Death never takes one alone, but two! Whenever he enters in at a door, Under roof of gold or roof of thatch, He always leaves it upon the latch, And comes again ere the year is o'er, Never one of a household only."

"There is no confessor like unto Death! Thou canst not see him, but he is near: Thou needest not whisper above thy breath, And he will hear; He will answer the questions, The vague surmises and suggestions, That fill thy soul with doubt and fear."

"The young may die, but the old must!"

"And, as she looked around, she saw how Death, the consoler, Laying his hand upon many a heart, had healed it forever."

"You are a player in the rigorous game of living. You can’t blame the game if you don’t believe the rules or bother to remember them. The first rule is: every player dies; none knows when it’s coming; the youngest and best often go first. Everyone has to play. The game goes on forever – or until you win. You win by finding death before it finds you. The prize – is life."

"O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away."

"What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life."

"Unfortunately a far greater number take things less philosophically. They have been taught that all men are destined to eternal flames except a favoured few who are superhumanly good; and since a very small amount of self examination convinces them that they do not belong to that category, they are but too often in a condition of panic terror, dreading every moment that the new world in which they find themselves may dissolve and drop them into the clutches of the devil, in whom they have been sedulously taught to believe. In many cases they spend long periods of acute mental suffering before they can free themselves from the fatal influence of this blasphemous doctrine of everlasting punishment - before they can realize that the world is governed, not according to the caprice of a hideous demon who gloats over human anguish, but according to a benevolent and wonderfully patient law of evolution, which is absolutely just indeed, but yet again and again offers to man opportunities of progress, if he will but take them, at every stage of his career."

"It is one of the many evils resulting from the absurdly erroneous teaching as to conditions after death which is unfortunately current in our western world, that those who have recently shaken off this mortal coil are usually much puzzled and often very seriously frightened at finding everything so different from what their religion had led them to expect. The mental attitude of a large number of such people was pithily voiced the other day by an English general, who three days after his death met one of the band of helpers whom he had known in physical life. After expressing his great relief that he had at last found someone with whom he was able to communicate, his first remark was: “But if I am dead, where am I? For if this is heaven I don’t think much of it; and if it is hell, it is better than I expected.” Ch. 12"

"A knowledge of the hidden side of life by no means teaches us to forget our dead, but it makes us exceedingly careful as to how we think of them; it warns us that we must adopt a resolutely unselfish attitude, that we must forget all about ourselves, and the pain of the apparent separation, and think of them neither with grief nor with longing, but always with strong affectionate wishes for their happiness and their progress. The clairvoyant sees exactly in what manner such wishes affect them, and at once perceives the truth which underlies the teaching of the Catholic Church with regard to the advisability of prayers for the dead. By these both the living and the dead are helped; for the former, instead of being thrown back upon his grief with a hopeless feeling that now he can do nothing, since there is a great gulf between himself and his loved one, is encouraged to turn his affectionate thought into definite action which promotes the happiness and advancement of him who has passed from his sight in the physical world. Of all this and much more I have written fully in the book called The Other Side of Death... p. 340"

"If you have been able to assimilate what I have already said, you will now understand that, however natural it may be for us to feel sorrow at the death of our relatives, that sorrow is an error and an evil, and we ought to overcome it. There is no need to sorrow for them, for they have passed into a far wider and happier life. If we sorrow for our own fancied separation from them, we are, in the first place, weeping over an illusion, for in truth they are not separated from us; and, secondly, we are acting selfishly, because we are thinking more of our own apparent loss than of their great and real gain. We must strive to be utterly unselfish, as indeed all love should be. We must think of them and not of ourselves-not of what we wish or we feel, but solely of what is best for them and most helpful to their progress."

"It is not infrequently our custom to seek to cover our own blank ignorance of certain subjects with the confident assertion that nothing ever has been or can be really known... our treatment of this question of the life after death is one of the worst examples of this habit. 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. (p. 42)"

"If it should be asked what it is that· we ought to wish for our dear· ones who have passed away-we who in many cases know so little of their condition that we might well fea to set in motion a force which might be ill-directed, for want of more exact knowledge of their need-we cannot do better than turn to the formulae of the Catholic Church once more, and use that beautiful antiphon which appears so often in the services for the dead: Eternal rest grant unto him, 0 Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him."

"What is a prayer for the dead but an expression of an earnest wish and loving thought for those who have passed on before us? We who study Theosophy know well that in physical life such wishes and such thoughts are real and objective things-storage batteries of spiritual force which will discharge themselves only when they reach the persons towards whom they are directed... The prayer or the strong loving wish for a particular dead person always reaches him and helps him, nor can it ever fail to do so while the great law of cause and effect remains part of the constitution of the universe. Even the earnest general prayer or wish for the good of the dead as a whole, though it is likely to be a vague and therefore a less efficient force, has yet in the aggregate produced an effect whose importance it would be difficult to exaggerate."

"One of our most serious losses at that time was the custom of prayer for the dead, and the nations who blindly threw away that means of helping their fellows have ever since paid the penalty of their folly in the persons of their departed members, who have had to fight their way unaided through the astral world..."

"The highly developed soul, who during earth life has gained complete control over his lower nature, and entirely dominated passion and desire, does in consequence sweep through the astral life with such rapidity that when he regains his consciousness he finds opening out before it the indescribable glory and bliss of the heaven-world. But the ordinary man has by no means succeeded in entirely dominating all earthly desires and passions before his death. Thus he finds himself upon the astral plane with a fairly vigorous desire-body, which he has made for himself during physical life, in which he now has to live until the process of its disintegration is in turn completed. It disintegrates only as · the desire which is its life dies out of it, and this often involves Suffering which is not inaptly symbolized by the fires of purgatory."

"The first and most fatal of all misconceptions about death is the idea that it is the end of all things; that there is nothing in man which survives it. Many people seem to be under the impression that this gross form of materialism has almost died out from among us; that it was a mental disease of the earlier part of the last century, and that the race has now outgrown it. It is much to be wished that this view represented the facts of the case, but I fear a careful student of contemporary thought can hardly endorse it. It is happily true that this noxious weed of materialism no longer -rears its, head in high places with the confidence of yore, for the men whose opinion is worthy of attention have by this time learnt better than that."

"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!"

"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."

"Death is a subject which cannot but be of the deepest interest to every one, since the one thing which is absolutely certain in the future biography of all men alike is that one day they must die-still more since there is hardly anyone, except the very young, from whose kin death has not already removed some dearly loved one. Yet though this is thus a question of such universal interest, there is perhaps none about which the misconceptions current in the popular mind are so many and so serious. It is impossible for us to calculate the vast amount of utterly unnecessary sorrow and terror and misery which mankind in the aggregate has suffered simply from its ignorance and superstition with regard to this one most important matter. There is amongst us a mass of ·false and foolish belief along this line which has worked untold evil in the past and is causing indescribable suffering in the present, and its eradication would be one of the greatest benefits that could be conferred upon the human race."

"But when the sun in all his state, Illumed the eastern skies, She passed through glory's morning gate, And walked in Paradise."

"Somewhere, in desolate, wind-swept space, In twilight land, in no man's land, Two hurrying shapes met face to face And bade each other stand. "And who are you?" cried one, a-gape, Shuddering in the glimmering light. "I know not," said the second shape, "I only died last night.""

"The white sail of his soul has rounded The promontory—death."

"Every breath you take is a step towards death."

"The separation of the spiritual part of the soul from the earthly body does not essentially change that spirit. A person takes with him the sum total of the character he has formed up to that time. Mortal death does not make a person better or worse; it simply adds to him one more experience which, no doubt, has a teachable influence on him."

"Oh Gilgamec! Enlil, the Great Mountain, the father of gods, has made kingship your destiny, but not eternal life -- lord Gilgamec, this is how to interpret the dream. [The end] of life should not make you feel sad, should not make you despair, should not make you feel depressed. You must have been told that this is what the bane of being human involves. You must have been told that this is what the cutting of your umbilical cord involved. The darkest day of humans awaits you now. The solitary place of humans awaits you now. The unstoppable flood-wave awaits you now. The unavoidable battle awaits you now. The unequal struggle awaits you now. The skirmish from which there is no escape awaits you now. But you should not go to the underworld with heart knotted in anger."

"In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death."

"Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, Advanced a stage or two upon that road Which you must travel in the steps they trod."

"He who died at Azan sends This to comfort all his friends: Faithful friends! It lies I know Pale and white and cold as snow; And ye say, "Abdallah's dead!" Weeping at the feet and head. I can see your falling tears, I can hear your sighs and prayers; Yet I smile and whisper this: I am not the thing you kiss. Cease your tears and let it lie; It was mine—it is not I."

"Her cabin'd ample spirit, It fluttered and fail'd for breath; Tonight it doth inherit The vasty hall of death."

"Our bodies are prisons for our souls. Our skin and blood, the iron bars of confinement. But fear not. All flesh decays. Death turns all to ash. And thus, death frees every soul."

"Following Pythagoras, Plato, the great Grecian philosopher, taught the old-new doctrine of Rebirth. He taught that the souls of the dead must return to earth, where, in new lives, they must wear out the old earth deeds, receiving benefits for the worthy ones, and penalties for the unworthy ones, the soul profiting by these repeated experiences, and rising step by step toward the divine. Plato taught that the reincarnated soul has flashes of remembrance of its former lives, and also instincts and intuitions gained by former experiences."

"It is not death that a man should fear, but never beginning to live."

"Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home."

"Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other."