Quotes & Sayings About Consolation In Death

One third of our life is spent in sleep. It is consolation for the troubles of our waking hours or atonement for their pleasures; but I have never experienced sleep to be mere repose. After a few minutes' lethargy, a new life begins, untrammeled by the limitations of time and space, and undoubtedly similar to that which awaits us after death ... — Gerard De Nerval

When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope. — Mohsin Hamid

To have the universe bear one company, would be a great consolation in death. — Publilius Syrus

The word of God is the only light in the darkness of this life, a word of life, consolation, and supreme blessedness. Where this precious and saving word is absent, nothing remains but a fearsome and terrifying darkness, error and faction, death and every calamity, and the tyranny of the devil himself, as we can see with our own eyes every day. — Timothy F. Lull

The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change in position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The body is transmuted into other forms, worms batten on it, it helps to feed the grass, and some animal consumes the grass. But as for the survival of the individual spirit of a man, show me one tittle of scientific evidence to support it. Besides, if it did survive, all the evil and malice in it must surely survive too. Why should the death of the body purge that away? It's a nightmare to contemplate such a thing, and oddly enough, unhinged people like spiritualists want to persuade us for our consolation that the nightmare is true.

("Monkeys") — E.F. Benson

And because I love this lifeI know I shall love death as well.The child cries out whenFrom the right breast the motherTakes it away, in the very next momentTo find in the left oneIts consolation. — Anonymous

I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times. — Josephine Winslow Johnson

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away - in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse's friends - but people don't die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue. — Donald Hall

When he hung over the death-bed of his infant son Ibrahim, resignation to the Will of God was exhibited in his conduct under this keenest of afflictions; and the hope of soon rejoining his child in paradise was his consolation. When he followed him to the grave, he invoked his spirit, in the awful examination of the tomb, to hold fast to the foundations of the faith, the Unity of God, and his own mission as a Prophet. — Washington Irving

Bitter the day of birth, for death is its companion. Yet, though life be cold and cruel, we are not without a last consolation. For to die in one world is to be born into another. Let all men hear and remember! — Stephen R. Lawhead

I do have the consolation that my enjoyment brings no death and suffering; when I die no one will jump up and down in joy; and I remember all the names and faces that matter to me." Mata — Ken Liu

Let sickness prostrate us, have we not seen hundreds of believers as happy in the weakness of disease as they would have been in the strength of hale and blooming health? Let death's arrows pierce us to the heart, our comfort dies not, for have not our ears full often heard the songs of saints as they have rejoiced because the living love of God was shed abroad in their hearts in dying moments? Yes, a sense of acceptance in the Beloved is an everlasting consolation. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The story of Issa, the eighteenth-century Haiku poet from Japan. Through a succession of sad events, his wife and all his five children died. Grieving each time, he went to the Zen Master and received the same consolation: "Remember the world is dew." Dew is transient and ephemeral. The sun rises and the dew is gone. So too is suffering and death in this world of illusion, so the mistake is to become too engaged. Remember the world is dew. Be more detached, and transcend the engagement of mourning that prolongs the grief. After one of his children died, Issa went home unconsoled, and wrote one of his most famous poems. Translated into English it reads, The world is dew. The world is dew. And yet. And yet. — Os Guinness

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

Physical pain is not the worst thing a human has to deal with," Altman said. "Believe me, I see it every day. Not death, either. Nor even fear of death." "What is the worst, then?" "Humiliation. To be deprived of honor and dignity. To be disrobed, to be cast out by the flock. That's the worst punishment; it's akin to being buried alive. And the only consolation is that the person will perish fairly quickly." "Mm." Harry kept eye contact with Altman. "You don't have anything in that cupboard to lighten the atmosphere, — Jo Nesbo

Let none falter who thinks he is right, and we may succeed. But if, after all, we shall fail, be it so: we still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our country's freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death, we never faltered in defending. — Abraham Lincoln

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard. — Henry David Thoreau

Sorrow is not in death but in loneliness, and conflict comes when you seek consolation, forgetfullness, explanations, and illusions. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word "hermeneutics" in the dictionary. — Steven Weinberg

The bottom line was that he didn't want to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone's problem. He wasn't any different from anyone else, but there was no consolation in that. — David Guterson

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so ... — Michael Cunningham

At nightfall I return home and enter my study. There on the threshold I remove my dirty, mud-spattered clothes, slip on my regal and courtly robes, and thus fittingly attired, I enter the ancient courts of bygone men where, having received a friendly welcome, I feed on the food that is mine alone and that I was born for. I am not ashamed to speak with them and inquire into the reasons for their actions; and they answer me in kindly fashion. And so for four hours I feel no annoyance; I forget all troubles; poverty hold no fears, and death loses its terrors. I become entirely one of them. — Niccolo Machiavelli

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Talk about something else. Tell me about this book you are writing."
"What book?" I say. Then : "Oh, I know what you mean. I am not doing that anymore. I couldn't finish._
I don't think he knows, not really. Not yet.
In my haste to finish this story before death overtakes me, inevitably I have left out many things, and often I have expresses myself inelegantly, and no doubt here and there I have said more than I meant to. When you return, my dear type writer, we will review what we have done, and add this and subtract that. This work has become my hobby and my consolation, and I enjoy it. — Phillip Margulies

Would I fortify myself against the fear of death, it must be at the expense of Seneca: would I extract consolation for myself or my friend, I must borrow it from Cicero. I might have found it in myself, had I been trained to make use of my own reason. I do not like this relative and mendicant understanding; for though we could become learned by other men's learning, a man can never be wise but by his own wisdom. — Michel De Montaigne

No, when it came to the ultimate and highest questions, there was no help from outside - no mediation, no absolution, no soothing consolation. Every man had to untangle the riddle on his own, had to work diligently at it, at hot speed, all by himself; before it was too late, he must either achieve some clear readiness for death, or die in despair. — Thomas Mann

Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask for anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. Love, truth, beauty, wisdom and consolation against death. Who had said that? someone else who loved books. — Cornelia Funke

I don't know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as I'm sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there's room for almost everything; for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future ... — Mark Doty

For my part I have no joy in tears after dinnertime. There will always be a new dawn tomorrow. Yet I can have no objection to tears for any mortal who dies and goes to his destiny. And this is the only consolation we wretched mortals can give, to cut our hair and let the tears roll down our faces. — Homer

The couple fell one atop of the other, struck down, finding consolation, at last, in death. — Emile Zola

And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die. — Peter Matthiessen

The heavenly blessing is to be delivered from the law, sin and death; to be justified and quickened to life: to have peace with God; to have a faithful heart, a joyful conscience, a spiritual consolation; to have the knowledge of Jesus Christ; to have the gift of prophecy, and the revelation of the Scriptures; to have the gift of the Holy Ghost, and to rejoice in God. — Martin Luther