SECULAR

FUNERAL

Thoughts on Death & Dying

 

There's nothing certain in a man's life except this:  That he must lose it.  ~Aeschylus, Agamemnon

 

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.  ~Euripides

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery.  He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does.  In place of this we have death.  ~Charles Sanders Peirce

 

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future.  It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.  ~Marcel Proust

 

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?  ~Kahlil Gibran, from "The Prophet"

 

 

Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream. ~Ryokan

 

 

Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure.  ~Mortimer Collins

 

 

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.  ~Charles de Gaulle

 

 

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight....
Not people die but worlds die in them. ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "People"

 

With thanks to Quote Garden.com

http://www.quotegarden.com/death.html