Quotes from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive -- a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?

I think that modern medicine has become like a prophet offering a life free of pain. It is nonsense. The only thing I know that truly heals people is unconditional love.

Paul Brunton's Notebooks are a veritable treasure-trove of philosophic-spiritual wisdom.

I only believe in what I see and hear with my own eyes and ears.

It is inconceivable for our unconscious to imagine an actual ending of our own life here on Earth, and if this life of ours has to end, the ending is always attributed to a malicious intervention from the outside by someone else.

Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.

It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on Earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up - that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no death the way we understood it. The body dies, but not the soul.

It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

My work with AIDS patients started right at the beginning of the epidemic, totally unplanned and spontaneous, as all my work had proceeded in the previous two decades, if it were not already my whole life-style! In the early eighties, we knew very little about this peculiar disease.

Fear and Guilt are the only enemies of man.

The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

Love is really the only thing we can possess, keep with us, and take with us.

The only incontrovertible fact of my work is the importance of life.

For years, I have been stalked by a bad reputation. Actually, I have been pursued by people who have regarded me as the 'Death and Dying' Lady. They believe that having spent more than three decades in research into death and life after death qualifies me as an expert on the subject. I think they miss the point.

I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

Begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.

Death is simply a shedding of the physical body, like the butterfly coming out of a cocoon. . . . It's like putting away your winter coat when spring comes.

It's not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather our concern must be to live while we're alive.

People after death become complete again. The blind can see, the deaf can hear, cripples are no longer crippled after all their vital signs have ceased to exist.

The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.

When you learn your lessons, the pain goes away.