Death is a mystery (quotes)

Death is a mystery

Death is the only mystery we all solve. Robin Skelton
Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret. Stephen King
If death disappears there will be no mystery in life. Rajneesh
A mysterious fraternity born out of smoke and danger of death. Stephen Crane
Death and what came after death was no great mystery to Sabriel. She just wished it was. Garth Nix
And the truth of the matter is that death is a mystery to me. I have no opinion on the subject. Oscar Zeta Acosta
When you have solved all the mysteries of life you long for death, for it is but another mystery of life. Khalil Gibran
The day of death … is one of the five mysteries, the key of which God holds in his own hands. Edouard Rene de Laboulaye
Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it’s what makes life interesting and suspenseful. Jeanne Moreau
I’m not afraid of death. That is the greatest mystery of all. That’ll be it, that one. But it is all a race against time. Jimmy Page
I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away – I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art. Jennifer Egan
The anguish of death hangs over and leads the human spirit to wonder about the mysteries of existence, man’s destiny, life, the world. Edgar Morin
What the word God means is the mystery really. It’s the mystery that we face as humans the mystery of existence, of suffering and of death. Ram Dass
Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop … find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side? Sidney Lanier
Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just! Shining nowhere but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust, Could man outlook that mark! Henry Vaughan
Is childhood ever long enough, or a happy time, or even a beautiful summer day? All of these carry the seeds of the same fierce mystery that we call death. Eugene Kennedy
Expose yourself to aloneness. When a person is left alone, he starts thinking of higher reality – about death, life, soul, God and the mystery of all. Chinmayananda Saraswati
In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy. Annie Dillard
I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it’s a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death. Beth Gibbons
If you deny mystery-even in the guise of death-then you deny life, and you will walk like a ghost through your days, never knowing the secrets of the extremes. The deep sorrows, the absolute joys. Lucius Shepard
We are full of words whose true meaning we haven’t been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don’t know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery. Alessandro Baricco
The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious. Francine Prose
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. Susan Sontag
Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don’t escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world- meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door. Rajneesh
Modern science and modern culture have an entirely different take on life and death. They don’t think of death as a metaphysical mystery, and they certainly don’t view death as the source of life’s meaning. Rather, for modern people death is a technical problem that we can and should solve. Yuval Noah Harari
Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It’s just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die; but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we’re left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them. Sam Harris
In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life. Leo Tolstoy
The greatest mystery in life is not life itself, but death. Death is the culmination of life, the ultimate blossoming of life. In death the whole life is summed up, in death you arrive. Life is a pilgrimage towards death. From the very beginning, death is coming. From the moment of birth, death has started coming towards you, you have started moving towards death. Rajneesh
The religious man, the mystic, tries to explore the mystery of death. In exploring the mystery of death, he inevitably comes to know what life is, what love is. Those are not his goals. His goal is to penetrate death, because there seems to be nothing more mysterious than death. Love has some mystery because of death, and life also has some mystery because of death. Rajneesh
Dying is the fastest route to fame for an aspiring rock star. The dead man’s melodies become profound, acquiring deep mystery and rising into a realm beyond the reach of human criticism. In the stopping of a heartbeat, the rocker is transformed from decadent, depraved hedonist into misunderstood genius. Aye, death and musical stardom go together like Scotland and rain. Mark Rice
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. H. P. Lovecraft
We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. This seems to be close to the heart of that mystery. I know no more now than I ever did about the far side of death as the last letting-go of all, but now I know that I do not need to know, and that I do not need to be afraid of not knowing. God knows. That is all that matters. Frederick Buechne
If death disappears there will be no mystery in life. That’s why a dead thing has no mystery in it, a corpse has no mystery in it, because it cannot die anymore. You think it has no mystery because life has disappeared? No, it has no mystery because now it cannot die anymore. Death has disappeared, and with death automatically life disappears. Life is only one of the ways of death’s expression. Rajneesh
I think the reason people investigate the paranormal is because we are trying to overcome the mystery of death. That in and of itself is something that lives within every living person, everybody. We all experience death and we are forced to find out if that is just the end, which it is not. So what we do is, when we are experiencing a situation that maybe scary, it’s almost now a sense of relief. Zak Bagans
And the greatest calamity that has happened to the human mind is that he is against death. Being against death means you will miss the greatest mystery. And being against death also means that you will miss life itself – because they are deeply involved into each other; they are not two. Life is growing, death is the flowering of it. The journey and the goal are not separate; the journey ends in the goal. Rajneesh
Death is a vast mystery, but there are two things we can say about it: It is absolutely certain that we will die, and it is uncertain when or how we will die. The only surety we have, then, is this uncertainty about the hour of our death, which we seize on as the excuse to postpone facing death directly. We are like children who cover their eyes in a game of hide and seek and think that no one can see them. Sogyal Rinpoche
As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery…I consider nature’s facts — its beautiful and grotesque forms and events — in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy. Annie Dillard
You would know the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heath of life? The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one. For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? Khalil Gibran
At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark . . . staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer. Mark Haddon

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Life is a mystery as great as death

Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be. Mary Mapes Dodge
Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront. James Frey
Life and death and birth is this fantastic mystery that we cannot fully grasp. Brit Marling
Death is not a mystery; it is very simple and clear! It is the life which is the complex and the mystic one! Mehmet Murat Ildan
Alas the Master; so he sinks in death. But whoso knows the mystery of man Sees life and death as curves of the same plan. Aleister Crowley
If God is life, then life is the ultimate mystery, a mystery greater than death, a mystery that cannot be grasped, understood or explained away especially in words or an ideology.
It is not a matter of life and death. It is not that important. But it is a reflection of life, and so the game is an enigma wrapped in a mystery impaled on a conundrum. Peter Alliss
Life is neither linear nor stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. Rachel Naomi Remen
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
I am absolutely enraptured by the atmosphere of a wreck. A dead ship is the house of a tremendous amount of life-fish and plants. The mixture of life and death is mysterious, even religious. There is the same sense of peace and mood that you feel on entering a cathedral. Jacques Yves Cousteau
The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination. Joseph Campbell
Upon the purple tree-tops far away, and on the green height near at hand up which the shades were slowly creeping, there was an equal hush. Between the real landscape and its shadow in the water, there was no division; both were so untroubled and clear, and, while so fraught with solemn mystery of life and death, so hopefully reassuring to the gazer’s soothed heart, because so tenderly and mercifully beautiful. Charles Dickens
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren- song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. Ayaan Hirsi Ali
A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. And gift. By focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation. Life is neither linear nor stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. Rachel Naomi Remen
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. Albert Einstein

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Love is a mystery as great as death

Love is a greater mystery than death. Jo Nesbo
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. Oscar Wilde
Love’s over brimming mystery joins death and life. It has filled my cup of pain with joy. Rabindranath Tagore
Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness,–mysterious, universal, inevitable as death. Harriet Martineau

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Birth is a mystery as great as death

Death is much simpler than birth; it is merely a continuation. Birth is the mystery, not death. Stewart Edward White
Death, like birth, is one of nature’s mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same. Marcus Aurelius
There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do. Alan Watts
Every life is framed by two mysteries. Only one of them, birth, is considered a miracle…. The other mystery that occurs, usually decades later, death, is very different. It brings to an end all the things birth struggled so hard to achieve. A thready heartbeat crosses an invisible line and becomes still. The bellows of the lungs, which have pumped some 700 million times, refuse to pump even once more. A hundred billion neurons cease to fire; a trillion billion cells throughout the body receive the news that their mission is over. Yet this abrupt finale is as much a mystery as birth, for at the moment life ends, 99% of our cells are typically still functional…. Some cells don’t even get the news for some time. If the dead person is revived within ten minutes or so, before the brain gets permanently damaged by hypoxia, the body’s machinery will go back to work as if nothing had happened. Deepak Chopra

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Growth is a mystery as great as death

Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth. Norman Mailer