Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Quotations

The opinion which other people have of you is their problem, not yours.

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

People are like stained - glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.

Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.

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 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.

The simple life on the farm was everything to me. Nothing was more relaxing after a long plane flight than to reach the winding driveway that led up to my house. The quiet of the night was more soothing than a sleeping pill.

Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.

According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own.

Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You're not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you're at peace with yourself. Learning life's lessons is not about making your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be.

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.

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.

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.

I say to people who care for people who are dying, if you really love that person and want to help them, be with them when their end comes close. Sit with them - you don't even have to talk. You don't have to do anything but really be there with them.

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 believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

I was destined to work with dying patients. I had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I felt called to travel some 250,000 miles each year to hold workshops that helped people cope with the most painful aspects of life, death and the transition between the two.

We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.

I think 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.

Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

Death is staring too long into the burning sun and the relief of entering a cool, dark room.

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, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

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

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.

It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.

Medicine has changed greatly in the last decades. Widespread vaccinations have practically eradicated many illnesses, at least in western Europe and the United States. The use of chemotherapy, especially the antibiotics, has contributed to an ever decreasing number of fatalities in infectious diseases.

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.

We're put here on Earth to learn our own lessons. No one can tell you what your lessons are; it is part of your personal journey to discover them. On these journeys we may be given a lot, or just a little bit, of the things we must grapple with, but never more than we can handle.

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.

Live, so you do not have to look back and say: 'God, how I have wasted my life.'

Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

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

The truth does not need to be defended.

Death is not painful. It is the most beautiful experience you will have.

As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do.

I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers.

We often assume that if we are good people we will not suffer the ills of the world.

If people would get in touch with their spirits, they would be able to heal, emotionally and physically.

Any natural, normal human being, when faced with any kind of loss, will go from shock all the way through acceptance.

I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever. If you live each day of your life right, then you have nothing to fear.

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

Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.

When we grow older and begin to realize that our omnipotence is really not so omnipotent, that our strongest wishes are not powerful enough to make the impossible possible, the fear that we have contributed to the death of a loved one diminishes - and with it, the guilt.

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.

For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.

I'm going to dance in all the galaxies.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it. Dwight Eisenhower People are like stained glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

Grief will happen either as an open healing wound or a closed festering wound, either honestly or dishonestly, either appropriately or inappropriately. But emotions will be expressed.

Lots of my dying patients say they grow in bounds and leaps, and finish all the unfinished business. But assisting a suicide is cheating them of these lessons, like taking a student out of school before final exams. That's not love, it's projecting your own unfinished business

Memories are the only real gifts we can leave our children.

Our only purpose in life is growth.

Death is the great transition.

We point to our unhappy circumstances to rationalize our negative feelings. This is the easy way out. It takes, after all, very little effort to feel victimized.

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

When you learn your lessons, the pain goes away.

There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.

We bring a deeper commitment to our happiness when we fully understand, that our time left is limited and we really need to make it count.

Throughout life, we get clues that remind us of the direction we are supposed to be headed if you stay focused, then you learn your lessons.

I am an artist because the knot is so powerful I just can not, nor want to be, anything else or do anything else.

God, how I have wasted my life.

Free choice is the greatest gift God gives to his children.

Beautiful people do not just happen

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.

I look for mystery and try to decipher it while knowing it is an impossible task. I look for memory, where Mystery lies.

Dying is an integral part of life, as natural and predictable as being born. But whereas birth is cause for celebration, death has become a dreaded and unspeakable issue to be avoided by every means possible in our modern society. Perhaps it is that.

A woman needs to know about blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol. And she needs to know the kinds of things she can do to stay healthy.

If you are ready for mystical experiences, you have them.

Old age is not synonymous with being 'glad to die.

To love means not to impose your own powers on your fellow man but offer him your help. And if he refuses it, to be proud that he can do it on his own strength.

Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means.

How do the geese know when to fly to the sun?

When I die I'm going to dance first in all the galaxies...I'm gonna play and dance and sing.

Everything in this life has a purpose, there are no mistakes, no coincidences.

I have learned there is no joy without hardship. There is no pleasure without pain. Would we know the comfort of peace without the distress of war?

Death is the final stage of growth in this life. There is no total death. Only the body dies. The self or the spirit, or whatever you may wish to label it, is eternal. You may interpret this in any way that makes you comfortable.

Fear and Guilt are the only enemies of man.

Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you've lived.

When life puts you through a tumbler, it's your choice whether you come out polished or crushed.

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?

"...All events are blessings given to us to learn from and therefore we should be grateful for the opportunity to grow and evolve into our best selves."

Every individual human being born on this earth has the capacity to become a unique and special person, unlike any who has ever existed before or ever will exist again.

Mankind's greatest gift... is that we have free choice.

We all have to go through the tumbler a few times before we can emerge as a crystal.

I'm not okay, you're not okay, and that's okay.

If, on the other hand, you listen to your own inner voice, to your own inner wisdom, which is far greater than anyone else's as far as you are concerned, you will not go wrong, and you will know what to do with your life. Then time is no longer relevant.

We will never be enlightened unless we realize and own what our capacity, from the best of the best to the worst of the worst because then we have more empathy, more compassion, more sympathy for others who do things that are hurtful and harmful and we see, given certain situations, I'm capable of that myself. So, I'm less judgmental.

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

Even though I had a good income from my lectures, no one would give me a loan. The insanity almost drove me to sympathize with the feminist movement.

It is my conviction that it is the intuitive, spiritual aspects of us humans-the inner voice-that gives us the 'knowing,' the peace, and the direction to go through the windstorms of life, not shattered but whole, joining in love and understanding.

I think that as you evolve spiritually, automatically your body tells you what is acceptable for your body and what is not.

Death is a graduation. When we're taught all the things we came to teach, learned all the things we came to learn, then we're allowed to graduate.

There is no problem that is not actually a gift.

We cannot find peace if we are afraid of the windstorms of life.

There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame that heats our soul, energizes our spirit, and supplies passion to our lives.