Being At Peace With Death Quotes & Sayings

Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death. But by that very fact the solitary finds himself on the level of a more perfect spiritual society - the city of those who have become real enough to confess and glorify God (that is, life) in the teeth of death. — Thomas Merton

Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death. — Dean Koontz

Dwell in peace in the home of your own being, and the Messenger of Death will not be able to touch you. — Guru Nanak

On who the flies landed without being chased away by that person, was on her way to death - this was one of the unmistakeable signs. From that time on, I think, dates my obsession with flies. In times of peace, when we all lied still, I made sure to sneak close up to my mother, watching very carefully that no fly would land on her, - I waved my hat over her body, flies don't like wind and movement ... — Jeroen Brouwers

Part of this experience involves your being able to say to a person who is dying, You are loved. You are beautiful. You are like a newborn babe, going into another realm. Release now anyone, and everything, that is a burden to you. Release everything and know that you have lived your life to the fullest. There is no judgment on you. Go in peace, put a smile on your face, and release any judgments you hold. Relax, and allow your life to have meaning as you embark on the next phase of your identity. — Barbara Marciniak

I'm still of the same mind. For many years I've been ashamed, mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn. As time went on, I merely learned that even those who were better than the rest could not keep themselves nowadays from killing or letting others kill, because such is the logic by which they live, and that we can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody. Yes, I've been ashamed ever since I have realized that we all have the plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the mortal enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. — Albert Camus

So I hold out my arms to my Redeemer, who, having been foretold for four thousand years, has come to suffer and to die for me on earth, at the time and under all the circumstances foretold. By His grace, I await death in peace, in the hope of being eternally united to Him. Yet I live with joy, whether in the prosperity which it pleases Him to bestow upon me, or in the adversity which He sends for my good, and which He has taught me to bear by His example. 737 — Blaise Pascal

Tallent notes that the days surrounding the death are marked not by keening or weeping but instead by a dignified, almost majestical, sense of quiet and contemplation. The deceased's immediate family continues to go about their daily rituals, but their silence, their lack of chatter in this busy, intimate community, is a ritual in itself, and the other villagers give them peace until the bereaved signal their intention to return to the life of the community. Sometimes this silent mourning takes only days; sometimes it takes months. But it is a remarkable demonstration of being absent in a place so intensely present, of being granted solitude while surrounded by many — Hanya Yanagihara

The present moment is all that ever is, and in each new moment we die and are reborn. For example, people block love and close off their hearts out of fear of being hurt again. If they lived in the present moment, there would be no fear and they would walk forward in life with confidence and certainty that there is the joy of new experiences to be had. — Alaric Hutchinson

How could I have been so blind as to want a soul? It was laughable now, to think that a soul could live inside me without being tainted by the centuries of blood and evil and death.
The voices agreed, laughing at me, mocking my quest. I didn't deserve a soul; I didn't deserve happiness, or peace. Why should I get my happy ending, when I'd left a swath of horror and destruction behind me wherever I went? — Julie Kagawa

One was watching the other day a red-tailed hawk, high in the heavens, circling effortlessly, without a beat of the wing, just for the fun of flying, just to be sustained by the air-currents. Then it was joined by another, and they were flying together for quite a while. They were marvellous creatures in that blue sky, and to hurt them in any way is a crime against heaven. Of course there is no heaven; man has invented heaven out of hope, for his life has become a hell, an endless conflict from birth to death, coming and going, making money, working endlessly. This life has become a turmoil, a travail of endless striving. One wonders if man, a human being, will ever live on this earth peacefully. Conflict has been the way of his life - within the skin and outside the skin, in the area of the psyche and in the society which that psyche has created. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

For great changes in the human mind are terrible. As we realize them we realize the limitless possibilities of sinister deeds that lie hidden in every human being. A little child that loves a doll can become an old, crafty, secret murderer. How horrible! And perhaps it is still more horrible to think that, while the human envelope remains totally unchanged, every word of the letter within may become altered, and a message of peace fade into a sentence of death. — Robert Smythe Hichens

As the nation groped to understand the enormity of their loss, the need to apportion blame was the inevitable handmaiden of their grief. Before it was discovered that the driver was drunk and speeding, it was the notorious paparazzi who were in the dock. Speaking from South Africa, Earl Spencer was the first to point a finger. Visibly angered by the waste of his sister's life he said: 'I always believed the press would kill her in the end. But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case. It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana's image, has blood on their hands today.'
He went on: 'Finally the one consolation is that Diana is now in a place where no human being can ever touch her again. I pray that she rests in peace. — Andrew Morton

Two-thirds of the terminal cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did have discussions were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive care unit. Most of them enrolled in hospice. They suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. In addition, six months after these patients died, their family members were markedly less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish. — Atul Gawande

Joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, find no place in that man's breast; for to him all creation is ONE. And all things being thus united in ONE, his body and limbs are but as dust of the earth, and life and death, beginning, and end, are but as night and day, and cannot destroy his peace. How much less such trifles as gain or loss, misfortune or good fortune? — Zhuangzi

We hold in our hands a key to peace on earth, yet it has been overlooked. It is the near-death experience. It must be examined closely by every living human being. The near-death experience offers one common experience, and only one. It is time for the world to embrace this reality and come together in love. — April Michelle Lewis

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 Kubler-Ross

Out of your awareness you cannot become soldiers in a war because you will be able to see, with clear eyes, that you are going to kill people - people who have done no harm to you personally, people just like you. They have their children, their wives, their mothers, their old fathers to take care of - and you are killing the person just to get a gold medal. Your gun will slip out of your hand, and that will be an act of awareness. And you will feel tremendously blissful that it happened; even if you are being shot your death will be a glory, a peace, an adventure, a journey into a new world. — Rajneesh

The thought of death leaves me in perfect peace, for I have a firm conviction that our spirit is a being of indestructible nature; it works on from eternity to eternity, it is like the sun, which though it seems to set to our mortal eyes, does not really set, but shines on perpetually. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is "weak," "sinful" and anxious for a "good time." Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life. — George Orwell

I am dead already. Physical death will make no difference in my case. I am timeless being. I am free of desire or fear, because I do not remember the past or imagine the future. Where there are no names and shapes, how can there be desire and fear? With desirelessness comes timelessness. I am safe, because what is not, cannot touch what is. You feel unsafe, because you imagine danger. Of course, your body as such is complex and vulnerable and needs protection. But not you. Once you realize your own unassailable being, you will be at peace. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good. — Saul Bellow

I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good. — Albert Camus

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If, for the sake of argument, 1 million are violent, that's a mere .000625 percent of them. I wonder who among you wants to be judged on such a tiny minority. Further, at 1.6 billion, if all Muslims - or even most Muslims - were violent, the world would already be in flames. Most people simply want to live their lives in peace, with some degree of material comfort. I find it bizarre - and disturbing - that so many Americans imagine that being a Muslim somehow trumps human nature and makes ordinary simple people want to rise up and kill everyone. That takes a special kind of stupid. — Dave Champion

#8 - Feeling Peaceful - It is helpful to be at peace with your loved one's returning Home to God, in order to be better able to receive a comforting communication. Feeling peaceful is an emotion that is very hard to experience when you are, understandably, very upset as you go through the grieving process. But being emotionally overwrought can give out negative energy, thus, making it harder for your loved one to get through to you, or for you to even notice a sign from them. However, all things are possible with God, and He may bless you with an after-death communication, no matter what the circumstances, because He wants to comfort you and bring you peace. Pray for peace for your anguished heart. Pray for acceptance and comfort, so that you can go on with your life contented in knowing that you will be fully reunited once again. — Christine Duminiak

And I feared that death picks up where life left off. An endless barrage of unbearable obstacles. A godforsaken terrain where lost souls find even less mercy. A shattered dreamstate where every somnambulant second is plagued by the nightmarish preoccupation of one's own fears. A bleak panorama where not even death offers any release, for what you wrought will come back to haunt. As if the struggle never ends. As if there is not now, nor ever has been peace. Peace being foreign to my nature. The nature of the fucking beast. — Lydia Lunch

I don't really enjoy experiencing pain. No one does. But we will become less human if we learn to detach ourselves from one another to the point that when we experience death of a beautiful being (our mothers, our fathers, our sisters, our brothers, our soul mates, our friends etc.) that it will not bother us that we will not feel. But see that's suppression. It will bother us somewhere deep inside. So, love someone. Hold them tight. Don't fear the loss. Fear the part of being too afraid to love someone. Love Everyone. It's inevitable: we all die. Thats the ugly part of life. But Love and being alive is so beautiful and so strong that the love, the memories stay even in death. Life is love, life is being alive to feel pain. The love the beautiful love always remains. Love. Life. Joy. Peace — Jill Telford

What I was suddenly aware of was the importance of their being whatever each of them was
cocky and contemptuous, or bothered and beaten
as long as it was something they'd come to in their own way: the importance of being human, in fact. The peace and harmony Uncle Ian and the others claimed to be handing out in fact was death, because without being yourself, an individual, you weren't really alive. — John Christopher

When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born. — Amanda Lindhout

The status of our relationship with God has moved from conflict to reconciliation, ensuring peace and communion with God. Our very being is transferred from the impending death of this world to the promised life of God's new creational order, leading us to an increased appetite for that which pleases God and a growing distaste for that which does not please him. Finally, our perspective is altered so that we no longer focus on outward appearances but on a radical interior radiance (vv. 12, 16). — Anonymous

It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life. The chance to escape from the reminders of illness and death, from a hectic life, and from clinical and teaching responsibilities was not unlike my earlier year as an undergraduate in St. Andrews: it gave me a semblance of peace that had eluded me, and a place of my own to heal and mull, but most important to heal. England did not have the Celtic, magical quality of St. Andrews - nothing, I suppose, ever could for me - but it gave me back myself again, gave me back my high hopes of life. And it gave me back, my belief in love. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Calm seeped through her body, taking the place of the fear. She experienced a blissful sense of homecoming, a peace she had never known, as the tiger became her and she became the tiger. In one fragment of time she understood all the mysteries of creation, that every living being was part of every other living being, that all were part of God, bound by love, put on earth to care for one another. She knew then that there was no fear, no disease, no death. Nothing of any importance existed but love. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over. — Hermann Hesse

There are many things in this world that are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn't strike me as one of them. Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind. — David Rakoff

Two more [birds added to her cage]. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!? - - - Miss Flite to Esther. [I thought a the last two a bit strange until I looked and saw the old definitions of gammon (as being double talk or obfuscation) and spinach (as being a spurious and unwanted growth). How appropriately summarized the situation! — Charles Dickens

Being alone can be good. It is easy to find peace alone. But sometimes...being alone is a kind of death. — Dean Koontz