Quotes About Death

How much of the "good death" is for the person dying and how much for the person helping him?

Moths and flames, mankind and death--there is little difference.

The only certainty, whether spoken or not, is that the doctors, nurses, and technicians are fighting not only death but their own uncertainties as well. In most resuscitations, those can be narrowed down to two main questions: Are we doing the right things? and, Should we be doing anything at all?

The more knowledge we have about the realities of lethal illness, the more sensible we can be about choosing the time to stop or the time to fight on, and the less we expect the kind of death most of us will not have. For those who die and those who love them, a realistic expectation is the surest path to tranquillity.

Shakespeare has Julius Caesar reflect that: Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.

The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we all can achieve… the hope that resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.

The patient dies alone among strangers: well-meaning, empathetic, determinedly committed to sustaining his life - but strangers nonetheless.

Unless we are aware that we are dying and so far as possible know the conditions of our death, we cannot share any sort of final consummation with those who love us. Without this consummation, no matter their presence at the hour of passing, we will remain

The difference between CVA as a terminal event and CVA as a cause of death is the difference between a worldview that recognizes the inexorable tide of natural history and a worldview that believes it is within the province of science to wrestle against those forces that stabilize our environment and our very civilization.

Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force

Whatever mystery attaches to such a death is imposed on it by those who live. It is a tribute to the human spirit that the life preceding triumphs over the ugly events that most of us will experience as we die, or as we move toward our last moments.

Today the law defines death, with appropriate blurriness, as the cessation of brain function. Though the heart may still throb and the unknowing bone marrow create new cells, no man's history can outlive his brain.

The ultimate aim of the scientist is not only knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge with the aim of overcoming that in our environment which he views as hostile. None of the acts of nature (or Nature) is more hostile than death.

Although it is not always admitted, the hospital has offered families a place where they can hide the unseemly invalid whom neither the world nor they can endure. … The hospital has become the place of solitary death.

It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.

The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we call all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.

The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society's, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person's humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

The very old do not succomb to disease-they implode their way into eternity. (How We Die)

The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. Ars moriendi as ars vivendi: The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.

The dignity we create in the time allotted to us becomes a continuum with the dignity we achieve by the altruism of accepting the necessity of death.

We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions upon trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died — in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.

Every life is different from any that has gone before it, and so is every death.

Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.

In the lives of working people the dramatic and vita moments of death and birth are passed over in silence.