Writings: Recommended Quotes
Here are some great quotes on the topic of funerals, memorials, and death.
"Words seem so feeble in moments like these. Life is so precious, and death such a thief. The depth of your pain I cannot comprehend, but I'll stand alongside you in the darkness, my friend. Love is a bond that death cannot part. Gone from your arms, but still held in your heart."
-John Mark Green
“Grief is like the ocean; it comes in waves, ebbing and flowing. Sometimes
the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim."
- Vicki Harrison
"Surrender to what is. Let go of what was. Have faith in what will be."
- Sonia Ricotti
“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived,
and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”
- Buddha
"A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings
us together again and again."
- Maya Angelou
"I have heard it said that winter, too, will pass, that spring is a sign that summer
is due at last. See, all we have to do is hang on."
- Maya Angelou
"When words are most empty, tears are most apt."
- Max Lucado
"I think of Heaven as a garden where I shall find again those dear ones who
have made my world."
- Minnie Aumonier
"That we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love
deeply becomes part of us."
- Helen Keller
"In one of the stars I shall be living In one of them I shall be laughing
And so it will be As if all the stars were laughing when you look
at the sky at night"
- The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"I have passed the mountain peak and my soul is soaring in the firmament of
Complete and unbounded freedom; I am in comfort, I am in peace."
- Kahlil Gibran
"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did.
And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."
- Raymond Carver
"Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come."
- Rabindranath Tagore
"Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul."
- Longfellow
"To sleep; perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause."
- William Shakespeare. Hamlet
"The dead don't die. They look on and help."
- D.H. Lawrance
"The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open: this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude."
- Washington Irvine
"In one sense there is no death. The life of a soul on earth lasts beyond departure. You will always feel that life touching yours, that voice speaking to you. He/She lives on in your life and in the lives of all others that knew him/her."
- Angelo Patri
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
- Henry David Thoreau Walden
"For every end no matter how tragic, there will be a new beginning."
- Anonymous
"Whoso is compassionate is everywhere beloved. By the kind and good he is prized as a friend, and at death his heart is full of peace."
- Namu Amida Butsu
"To die or not to die ... we really don't have a choice. We can therefore only take care of our life-body, until the fullness of time and being ends our existence on earth."
- Taitesu Unno
"Gone, gone, gone beyond. Gone utterly beyond. Oh what an awakening."
- Heart Sutra.
"The song is ended, but the melody lingers on..."
- Irving Berlin
"He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us."
- Helen Keller
"Grieve not, nor speak of me with tears, but laugh and talk of me as if I were beside you there."
- Isla Paschal Richardson
"To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die."
- Thomas Campbell
“Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men”
- Quintus Ennius
“I can't think of a more wonderful thanksgiving for the life I have had than that everyone should be jolly at my funeral”
- Admiral (Lord) Louis Mountbatten