Quotes & Sayings About Birth And Death

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization. — Jacques Ellul

Birth, copulation, death. You come out of one hole and you end up in another one. It's a pretty short trip. — Donald O'Donovan

If you have seen in silent prayer
How the soul of the earth fashions crystals,
If you have seen the flame in the growing seed
And death in life and birth in decay,
If you have found brothers in men and beasts,
And if you recognized in the brother, the brother and God,
Then you will celebrate at the table of the holy grail
Communion with the messiah of love.
You will search and you will find, just like God said,
The way to the lost paradise. — Manfred Kyber

The years between Roger Bacon's birth, in 1220, and Uthred's death, in 1370, are considered the final flowering of the Middle Ages. They were followed by a longer, grimmer period in Europe, during which the machinery for rooting out heresy defeated enlightened discourse almost completely. The early condemnation of works by William Ockham, Johannes Eckehart, the spiritual Franciscans, and Dante signaled the start of a breakdown in the integrity of Western thought. During this Great Interruption, xenophobia replaced curiosity, interest in Islam and the classics withered, and Muslim thought was anathematized or ignored. Fifty years later, it was no longer wise to learn Arabic, Hebrew, or even Greek. — Michael Wolfe

Have patience, Margaret, and trouble not thyself. Death comes for us all; even at our birth - death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh. It is the law of nature and the will of God. — Robert Bolt

Sacrificing earth to paradise is like leaving your fortune to a corpse. I'm not that stupid. Duped by the Infinite! I am nothing; I call myself Count Nothing, the senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Will I after my death? No. What am I? A little dust surrounding an organism. What do I have to do on this earth? I have the choice of pain or pleasure. Where will pain lead me? To nothing. But I will have suffered. Where will pleasure lead me? To nothing. But I will have enjoyed. My choice is made. I must eat or be eaten, and I choose to eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. That's my philosophy. — Victor Hugo

The day of death is better than the day of birth, a live dog is better than a dead lion, and the grave is better than poverty. — N.J. Dawood

Death looms large I guess because it should. It's the one thing that we as human beings from birth have a right to. It's the only thing we've really got, and I don't mean to sound bleak about this, but it's a unifying factor amongst us all. — Nick Cave

At thirteen, Noboru was convinced of his own genius (each of the others in the gang felt the same way) and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man's only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too: that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin. Therefore, his own father's death, when he was eight, had been a happy incident, something to be proud of. — Yukio Mishima

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches. In — Douglas Adams

Joys do not fall to the rich alone; nor has he lived ill of whose birth and death no one took note. — Horace

For most of us, karma and negative emotions obscure the ability to see our own intrinsic nature, and the nature of reality. As a result we clutch on to happiness and suffering as real, and in our unskillful and ignorant actions go on sowing the seeds of our next birth. Our actions keep us bound to the continuous cycle of worldly existence, to the endless round of birth and death. So everything is at risk in how we live now at this very moment: How we live now can cost us our entire future. — Sogyal Rinpoche

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death. — E. M. Forster

Birth, copulation, and death. Fine. In truth, however, there were at least two other things in which Amanda strongly believed. Namely: magic and freedom. — Tom Robbins

Immortality: "It is impossible to be conscious of being unconscious."

It is not possible to be aware of being unconscious from your own perspective. You cannot be aware of not being aware. You can be less aware/conscious, such as when you are asleep, but not completely unconscious (dead), because time would stand still for you. A billion years could pass, and you would not know it.

How do you know you are dead? It is not possible to be aware of any gaps in life; it is continuous and never-ending from your own point of view.

Death and birth are a continuous event from your own perspective.

You will die physically, but you will be born into a new physical body. Being born happens, or you would not be here now. You were born into this life. It is what we know happens. There is no evidence anything else happens. True or false? — Michael Smith

Once I saw torches with dancing flames of scarlet and radiant gold held by solemn apes. A man with the horns and muzzled face of a bull bent over me, a constellation sprung to life. I spoke to him and found myself telling him that I was unsure of the precise date of my birth, that if his benign spirit of meadow and unfeigning force had governed my life I thanked him for it; then remembered that I knew the date, that my father had given a ball for me each year until his death, that it fell under the Swan. He listened intently, turning his head to watch me from one brown eye. — Gene Wolfe

Now come: that thou mayst able be to know
That minds and the light souls of all that live
Have mortal birth and death, I will go on
Verses to build meet for thy rule of life,
Sought after long, discovered with sweet toil. — Lucretius

The life of every man is a way to himself, an attempt at a way, the suggestion of a path. No man has ever been utterly himself, yet every man strives to be so, the dull, the intelligent, each one as best he can. Each man to the end of his days carries round with him vestiges of his birth - the slime and egg-shells of the primeval world. There are many who never become humans; they remain frogs, lizards, ants. Many men are human being above and fish below. Yet each one represents an attempt on the part of nature to create a human being. — Hermann Hesse

It's thrilling. There's birth and death and frustration and victory in raising horses. It's like a little microcosm of life is built into the short lives of these creatures. — John Phillips

There are three great events in our lives: birth, life and death. Of birth we have no conscience; with death, we suffer; and, concerning life, we forget to live it. — Jean De La Bruyere

I think one thing that kids who grow up on farms really have going for them is they have exposure to death and birth in a totally different way. I think it takes away a little bit of the mystery and a little bit of the fear, and I do wish I had that. And I wish I was able to grow my own food. — Rachel McAdams

Nothing at all can prevent the universal process of birth, growth, decay, and death. — Joseph Goldstein

God is without birth and death and is an eternal witness; you must strive hard to earn the love of God. — Sathya Sai Baba

Everyone's an equal shareholder. Birth shares are inalienable, and death duties are unavoidable. The estate tax is one hundred per cent. In between, you can buy and sell and earn as much as you like. — Ken MacLeod

In the life of a child of the elite, there are many moments ripe for a grand celebration. There are birth and the inevitable death.In between,various stages of consciousness define the nature and scale of celebration. — K.J. Kilton

I bent my head and breathed the fresh new scent of her. I looked into her deep blue eyes and saw reflected there the dawn of my own new life. This little girl seemed to me, at that moment, answer enough to all my questions. To have saved this small, singular one - this alone seemed reason enough that I lived. I knew then that this was how I was meant to go on: away from death and toward life, from birth to birth, from seed to blossom, living my life amongst wonders. — Geraldine Brooks

When you pray to God resignedly, as though patiently accepting the punishment of grief at the death of a loved one, and you say: "Thy will be done O Lord. The Lord giveth, and he taketh away", you have not yet known the God of love, for God giveth only. God never takes that which has not been given. What God gives to you you regive to Him for His regiving.
You rejoice when God gives birth to life, yet you deeply grieve when you give rebirth to new life - for that is what death is. — Walter Russell

The seeds of life - fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that's born for death. That is the source of all men's fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heaven's light, shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep. — Virgil

Death gets a bad rap. People think that euthanasia is putting their pets "down" when it really is lifting us up. In the first moment, when we come back to earth, we remember the comfort of the Heaven we came from and this is why we cry when we are born. When we are born in Heaven we come in laughing not crying! In birth we have the passage and then the pain. In death we have the pain and then the passage. — Kate McGahan

For much of our lives, we live in the shallows. Then something happens - a crisis, a birth, a death - and we get this glimpse of tremendous depth. My soul becomes shallow when my interests and thoughts go no further than myself. A person should be deep because life itself is deep. — John Ortberg

I wanted dad's life to be seen in that perspective, not the closeup, not the man children feared and who later drank himself to death, but the broad view, a human who was born on earth, pure and innocent, as all are at birth, and who lived a life as all humans do and died his death. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The emotions at death, as at birth, are instinctive and primitive. — Margaret Millar

Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again. — Conrad Aiken

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on. — Ray Bradbury

From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation. And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell? — Edvard Munch

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. — Robert Louis Stevenson

As we look deeply within, we understand our perfect balance. There is no fear of the cycle of birth, life and death. For when you stand in the present moment, you are timeless. — Rodney Yee

Here the four elements of solidity, fluidity, heat and motion have no place; the notions of length and breadth, the subtle and the gross, good and evil, name and form are altogether destroyed; neither this world nor the other, nor coming, going or standing, neither death nor birth, nor sense-objects are to be found. — Walpola Rahula

Nurses are there when the last breath is taken and nurses are there when the first breath is taken. Although it is more enjoyable to celebrate the birth, it is just as important to comfort in death. — Christine Bell

When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed. — Henry De Vere Stacpoole

The world is full of suffering. Birth is suffering, decre- pitude is suffering, sickness and death are sufferings. To face a man of hatred is suffering, to be separated from a beloved one is suffering, to be vainly struggling to satisfy one's needs is suffering. In fact, life that is not free from desire and passion is always involved with suffering. — Gautama Buddha

Lifeless and shockingly alien in that place where dissolution itself was a seething turmoil of ejaculation tumescence conception and birth, and death did not even exit. — William Faulkner

Everybody here is so caught up in the game of life they don't see death. They don't see beyond their deaths. They are on the wheel of birth and death. — Frederick Lenz

We attempted perfection; we wanted an object to be without flaw, so we cut the papers with a razor, pasted them down meticulously, but it buckled and was ruined ... that is why we decided to tear prewrinkled paper, so that in the finished work of art imperfection would be an integral part, as if at birth death were built in. — Hans Arp

Nothing essential happens through death, only through birth and that is the whole trouble - But shouldn't we be speaking of something more important than life and death? — Gustav Meyrink

Birth, and copulation, and death; that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks. — T. S. Eliot

Birth and Death are the two noblest expressions of bravery. — Khalil Gibran

The Kalambo River and Waterfall exemplify life and afterlife: From birth at its source, the river twists and turns to overcome hurdles on its way to enhance the life of others before falling off the edge in death to flow quietly into Lake Tanganyika, while it's mist rises to heaven, freed from the burden of the body of water that held it. — Kamil Ali

That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life. — Amelia Barr

Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage and death. — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Buddhism holds that everything is in constant flux. Thus the question is whether we are to accept change passively and be swept away by it or whether we are to take the lead and create positive changes on our own initiative. While conservatism and self-protection might be likened to winter, night, and death, the spirit of pioneering and attempting to realize ideals evokes images of spring, morning, and birth. — Daisaku Ikeda

Birth and death are the most singular events we experience - and the contemplation of death, as of birth, should be a thing of beauty, not ignobility. — Jacob K. Javits

War is an initiation into the power of life and death. Women touch that power on the moment of birth, men at the edge of death. — William Broyles Jr.

Nimrod continued, "These were the one percent of wealthy pigs who ruled over the ninety-nine percent of people with their greed and their selfishness! But I swear to you by my very head and by the head of my queen Semiramis, that as our subjects you will never go hungry!" The crowd burst out in applause. He milked it, "You will never be without shelter in the great city of Babylon!" More applause resounded. "You will never be without health and welfare!" The applause turned to jubilation. Nimrod reeled them in like a fish on a line. "You will be taken care of from birth to death under the mighty rule of Nimrod, emperor of the earth!" The masses swarmed with worship and screams of orgasmic release. Nimrod had secured their total dependency upon city-state and king. Nimrod had become their lord and savior. — Brian Godawa

The problem, Mitch, is that we don't believe we are as much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholics and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.
But believe me, when you are dying, you see it is true. We all have the same beginning - birth - and we all have the same end - death. So how different can we be?
Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.
Morrie Schwartz — Mitch Albom

In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death. — May Sarton

Rather than writing about international events, I write about individual lives. There is elation and sadness, death and birth, love and jealousy, co-operation and betrayal. All the great emotional transactions that happen wherever people come together. — Tom Drury

Was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn't get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there. — Charles Dickens

Making good use of our limited time - the limited time from birth to death, as well as our limited time each day - is the key to developing inner steadiness and calm. — Pema Chodron

I look out again at the sun-my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on rooftops. Everything above the horizon is clear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the goal-the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendor while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow ... — Henry Miller

We must constantly remind ourselves that we are eternity, infinite, beyond birth and death. — Frederick Lenz

It's natural. Nature is dark and light, birth and death. Everything and its opposite. And in nature there are predators and prey. The hunters and the hunted. The heartbreakers and the heartbroken. The beautiful thing is that Nature lets us choose which we want to be, most people never make the choice though because they don't even know they have it. — Lynn Weingarten

Though we were all taught to be proud of living in this great parliamentary democracy the civil servants who ran it were a fearsome bunch - a nameless mass of people with jobs (police, social workers, record-keepers, teachers, councilmen) whose sole purpose was to keep everyone shuffling from birth to death in a nice orderly queue. Surely some social-service record had been passed to the local constabulary bearing a huge black question mark beside the name Finn and the scrawled words, Why isn't this boy in school — Meg Rosoff

The interval between the beginning of 'I am' (birth or waking) and when you lose it again (death or deep sleep) is called 'time. — Nisargadatta Maharaj

Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Death is the inseparable antecedent of life; the seed dies in order to produce the plant, and earth itself is rent asunder and dies at the birth of Dionusos. Hence the significancy of the phallus, or of its inoffensive substitute, the obelisk, rising as an emblem of resurrection by the tomb of buried Deity at Lerna or at Sais. — Albert Pike

Mind is dual, it always divides things into polar opposites: the conqueror and the conquered, the observer and the observed, the object and the subject, the day and the night. It goes on dividing things which are not divided. Neither is the day divided from the night, nor is birth divided from death. They are one energy. But mind goes on dividing everything into polarities, opposites. Nothing is opposite in existence; every contradiction is only apparent. Deep down all contradictions are meeting together. — Rajneesh

Birth is but the beginning of a trajectory to death; for all their love, parents cannot halt it and in a sense have "given us to death" merely by giving us birth. — Anonymous

God is true. The universe is a dream. Blessed am I that I know this moment that I have been and shall be free all eternity; ... that I know that I am worshiping only myself; that no nature, no delusion, had any hold on me. Vanish nature from me, vanish these gods; vanish worship; ... vanish superstitions, for I know myself. I am the Infinite. All these - Mrs. So-and-so, Mr. So-and-so, responsibility, happiness, misery - have vanished. I am the Infinite. How can there be death for me, or birth? Whom shall I fear? I am the One. Shall I be afraid of myself? Who is to be afraid of whom? ... — Swami Vivekananda

Real health has to happen somewhere inside you, in your subjectivity, in your consciousness, because consciousness knows no birth, no death. It is eternal. To be healthy in consciousness means: first, to be awake; second, to be harmonious; third, to be ecstatic; and fourth, to be compassionate. — Rajneesh

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as his cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day. And as even his birth is his death, so every action and passage that manifests Christ to us is his birth, for Epiphany is manifestation. — John Donne

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. — Flannery O'Connor

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron. — James G. Frazer

There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror. — Karl Marx

Life is an endless circle within God. From before birth to beyond the transition called death, I am filled with life. My soul wears this earth garment I call my body, which I cherish and care for. When I finally lay it down, my soul continues to live, always in God's care and keeping. — Daily Word

But pain is hard to put into words and in life there is always pain. It's as natural as birth or death. Pain makes us who we are, it teaches us and tames us, it can destroy and it can save. — Anna McPartlin

Achievement is the death of endeavor and the birth of disgust. — Ambrose Bierce

Human beings are born to experience pure love, and they never get it. They are searching to experience it from birth until death. — Mata Amritanandamayi

I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. — Jack Kerouac

All I can say to people who hate their mothers for giving birth to them is "get the fuck out of your scaredy shells and kiss the world". — Jay Woodman

And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment. — Bodhidharma

Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. — Margaret Sanger

Unless you become alert and aware in life, unless you change the quality of your living, you will not die consciously. And only a conscious death can bring you to a conscious birth; and then a far more conscious life opens its doors. — Rajneesh

Rejoice at the death and cry at the birth: New Orleans sticks close to the Scriptures. — Jelly Roll Morton

My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?
"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
"It is why we are drawn to babies ... " He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals. — Mitch Albom

All the images of carnival are dualistic; they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis: birth and death (the image of pregnant death), blessing and curse (benedictory carnival curses which call simultaneously for death and rebirth), praise and abuse, youth and old age, top and bottom, face and backside, stupidity and wisdom. — Mikhail Bakhtin

One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard. — Henry Miller

We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents, or the country of our birth.
We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death.
But within this realm of choicelessnness, we do choose how we live. — Joseph Epstein

For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexibleorder gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves ... I would like to hole them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stooping one, there would only remain in may hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Thinking that the next person, the next relationship, the next experience will free you - these are foolish thoughts of people who are bound again and again to birth, death and rebrith for thousands and thousands of incarnations. — Frederick Lenz

We were putting into these gomers our fear of death, but who knew if they feared death? Perhaps they welcomed death like a dear long-lost cousin, grown old but still known, coming to visit, relieving the loneliness, the failing of the senses, the fury of the half-blind looking into the mirror and not recognizing who is looking back, a dear friend, a dear reliever, a healer who would be with them for an eternity, the same eternity as the long ago, before birth. — Samuel Shem

Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity. The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death. Tomorrow, when resurrection comes, The heart that is not in love will fail the test. — Rumi

I am quite above physical death and believe it to be only the birth throes for a much purer life in a much purer draping. — Elisabeth Of Wied

Our lives consist of two numbers: date of birth and date of death. — Javad Alizadeh

Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span ... — Isabel Allende

The Universe/God fluctuates from the appearance of many facets and then to Oneness then reverts back again to many facets. This is played out with the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation. This cycle of reincarnation is a fundamental pattern of our physical existence. Despite our appearance as many, we are all still one organism and long to be consolidated as one. — Russell Anthony Gibbs

One objective fact is that in 1939 there were 28 million Ukrainians, compared with 31 million in 1926, at a time when (barring famine) the birth rate was often twice the death rate. Deaths are calculated on this basis at anywhere between 2.4 and 4 million. More sophisticated studies give a figure nearer to 5 million. OGPU's tally from December 1932 to mid-April 1933 give a figure of 2.4 million deaths from famine and cannibalism; by extrapolating these — Vasily Grossman

In a span of months she had present for birth and for death, the wondrous first breath and the horrible last. But wasn't it an honor to be there at the end of life as well as the beginning? To mark the extraordinariness of a lifetime, to bear witness to its completion? — Rae Meadows

The wave can live the life of a wave, but it can also do better. It can live every moment of its life deeply touching its nature of no-birth and no-death, that is, its nature as water. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Death is like giving birth. Birth can be painful. Sometimes women die from giving birth. However, when the baby is born, all that pain (that was endured) vanishes in an instant. Love for that tiny baby makes one forget the pain, the fear. And as I've said before, love between mother and child is the highest experience, the closest to divine love.
You might wonder about the parallel I'm making between birth and death. But I say to you, the fear and pain accompanying an awful death is over quickly. Beyond that portal one is suddenly in the light, in oneness and bliss ... Just as a woman heals rapidly after childbirth and then is able to fall in love with her baby, those who pass over also are able to fall in love with a new life."-Kuan Yin (From "Oracle of Compassion: the Living Word of Kuan Yin — Hope Bradford