Top 30 Buddhist Death Quotes
#1. "The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world," says an old Buddhist teaching. In other words: Get used to it.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#2. Death and dying provide a meeting-point between the Tibetan Buddhist and modern scientific traditions. I believe both have a great deal to contribute to each other on the level of understanding and of practical benefit.
Dalai Lama
#3. The world is afflicted by death and decay. But the wise do not grieve, having realized the nature of the world.
Gautama Buddha
#6. [I'm concerned with] aesthetics and this idea of how the passage between life and death goes. I can visually present that by borrowing this Buddhist statue.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#7. All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.
Gautama Buddha
#8. Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death Making death their ideal basis for different ideals. The Communists however disapprove of death Except when practical.
William Empson
#9. I've heard a Buddhist monk suggest the number of food-caused deaths is minimized in steak dinners, which share one death over many meals, whereas the equation is reversed for a bowl of clams.
Barbara Kingsolver
#10. Just as one can make a lot of garlands from a heap of flowers, so man, subject to birth and death as he is, should make himself a lot of good karma.
Gautama Buddha
#11. Self discovery doesn't not seek to bring you answers about your personal life or philosophically comfort you about life and death. What it does is bring you into reality as perception itself.
Frederick Lenz
#12. In horror of death, I took to the mountains - again and again I meditated on the uncertainty of the hour of death, capturing the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind. Now all fear of death is over and done.
Milarepa
#13. No one can escape death and unhappiness. If people expect only happiness in life, they will be disappointed.
Gautama Buddha
#14. Holden had once dated a Buddhist who said that death was merely a different state of being, and people only feared the unknown that lay behind that transition. Death without warning was preferable, as it removed all fear.
He felt he now had the counterargument.
James S.A. Corey
#15. I spend a lot of time with Buddhists. I'm not a Buddhist, but their relationship with death interests me.
Joan Baez
#16. Of all footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.
Gautama Buddha
#17. Strong and healthy, who thinks of sickness until it strikes like lightning? Preoccupied with the world, who thinks of death, until it arrives like thunder?
Milarepa
#18. Oh son, watch the illusory spectacle! All birth and death is projected by delusion, not existing in reality. I am beyond coming and going.
Dzongsar Khyentse Chokyi Lodro
#19. At a personal level, as a Buddhist practitioner, I deliberately visualize and think about death in my daily practice. Death is not separated from our lives. Due to my research and thoughts about death, I have some guarantee and some conviction that it will be a positive experience.
Dalai Lama
#20. An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma as a source of answers to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc.
Stephen Batchelor
#21. I was exposed to a mix of cultures, lots of different religions and beliefs. I was a spiritual kid and went to Indian powwows and Buddhist temples. But over a period of time, with reading and thinking, I started to feel it was all so absurd: The whole idea of life after death is ridiculous.
Harvey Fierstein
#22. The Buddhist concept is that it takes 48 days to get near this state [of death]. So it's a slow process, moving into, not a permanent death, but the world of the dead.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#23. He who, seeking his own happiness, punishes or kills beings who also long for happiness, will not find happiness after his death.
Gautama Buddha
#24. In the world of Buddhist mind, in the advanced states, we go beyond time, space, life, death and Newsweek.
Frederick Lenz
#25. Attention leads to immortality. Carelessness leads to death. Those who pay attention will not die, while the careless are as good as dead already.
Gautama Buddha
#26. Thus all things are subject to death, sorrow and suffering. I became aware that I too was of the same nature, the nature of beginning and end. What if I searched for that which underlies all creation, that which is nirvana, the perfect freedom from unconditioned existence?
Gautama Buddha
#27. All beings tremble before violence. All love life. All fear death. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?
Gautama Buddha
#28. This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.
Gautama Buddha
#29. Few are those among men who have crossed over to the other shore, while the rest of mankind runs along the bank. However those who follow the principles of the well-taught Truth will cross over to the other shore, out of the dominion of Death, hard though it is to escape.
Gautama Buddha
#30. Death carries off a man busy picking flowers with an besotted mind, like a great flood does a sleeping village.
Gautama Buddha
