Top 100 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Quotes
#1. Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#2. Children who die young are some of our greatest teachers. We are allowed to die when we have taught what we came to teach and when we have learned what we came to learn.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#4. We make progress in society only if we stop cursing and complaining about its shortcomings and have the courage to do something about them.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#6. Death is but a transition from this life to another existence where there is no more pain and anguish. All the bitterness and disagreements will vanish, and the only thing that lives forever is love.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#7. I am an artist because the knot is so powerful I just can not, nor want to be, anything else or do anything else.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#8. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#9. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#10. We all have to go through the tumbler a few times before we can emerge as a crystal.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#11. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#12. Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#14. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#15. The beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#17. When I die I'm going to dance first in all the galaxies ... I'm gonna play and dance and sing.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#18. Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#19. When you spend your life doing what you love to do, you are nourishing your Soul. It matters not what you do, only that you love whatever you happen to do.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#20. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#21. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#23. Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#24. 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
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#25. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#26. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#27. It is very important that you do only what you love to do. You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may live in a shabby place, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days, you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#28. I was educated in line with the basic premise: work work work. You are only a valuable human being if you work. This is utterly wrong. Half working, half dancing - that is the right mixture. I myself have danced and played too little.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#30. It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you'll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#31. 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?
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#32. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#34. But at the time of transition, your guides, your guardian angels, people whom you have loved and who have passed on before you, will be there to help you. We have verified this beyond a shadow of a doubt, and I say this as a scientist. There will always be someone to help you with this transition.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#36. Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#38. I look for mystery and try to decipher it while knowing it is an impossible task. I look for memory, where Mystery lies.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#41. I think that as you evolve spiritually, automatically your body tells you what is acceptable for your body and what is not.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#42. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#43. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#44. Paul Brunton's Notebooks are a veritable treasure-trove of philosophic-spiritual wisdom.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#45. It's not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather our concern must be to live while we're alive.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#46. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#47. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#48. We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#49. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#50. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#51. I once considered writing a book called I'm not OK and you're not OK, and that's OK.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#52. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#53. Facing death means facing the ultimate question of the meaning of life. If we really want to live we must have the courage to recognize that life is ultimately very short, and that everything we do counts.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#54. There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#56. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#57. Mourning can go on for years and years. It doesn't end after a year, that's a false fantasy. It usually ends when people realize that they can live again, that they can concentrate their energies on their lives as a whole, and not on their hurt, and guilt and pain.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#58. If people would get in touch with their spirits, they would be able to heal, emotionally and physically.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#59. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#60. I believe every person has a guardian spirit or angel. They assist us in the transition between life and death and they also help us pick our parents before we are born.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#61. " ... 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."
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#62. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#65. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#66. The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#67. We do things hopefully because they add life to our living, but not with the illusion they will help us escape death when our time comes.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#68. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#70. We think sometimes we're only drawn to the good, but we're actually drawn to the authentic. We like people who are real more than those who hide their true selves under layers of artificial niceties
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#71. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#72. 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?
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#73. We often assume that if we are good people we will not suffer the ills of the world.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#74. There is within each one of us a potential for goodness beyond our imagining; for giving which seeks no reward; for listening without judgment; for loving unconditionally.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#75. We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#76. Dying nowadays is more gruesome in many ways, namely, more lonely, mechanical, and dehumanized; at times it is even difficult to determine technically when the time of death has occurred.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#78. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#80. Live, so you do not have to look back and say: 'God, how I have wasted my life.'
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#81. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#83. You are not a powerless speck of dust drifting around in the wind ... we are, each of us, like beautiful snowflakes-unique, and born for a specific reason and purpose.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#84. Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you've lived.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#85. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#86. How do geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within if only we would listen to it, that tells us certainly when to go forth into the unknown.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#89. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#91. When life puts you through a tumbler, it's your choice whether you come out polished or crushed.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#92. When we have passed the tests we are sent to Earth to learn, we are allowed to graduate. We are allowed to shed our body, which imprisons our souls.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#94. There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#95. There is no joy without hardship. If not for death, would we appreciate life? If not for hate, would we know the ultimate goal is love? At these moments you can either hold on to negativity and look for blame, or you can choose to heal and keep on loving.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#96. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#97. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#98. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#99. Any natural, normal human being, when faced with any kind of loss, will go from shock all the way through acceptance.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#100. 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.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
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