“Of all the world’s wonders which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believe that he himself will die.”

— Vyasa व्यास 1
Hindu immortals, Vishnu avatar, 5th incarnation of Brahma
from Mahābhārata महाभारतम्

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“Death is only the beginning...”

— Imhotep 2650 – 2600 BCE
First Western architect, engineer and physician

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“Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

— Homer 1
Primogenitor of Western culture
from Iliad

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“Know the other and know oneself,
Then victory is not in danger.
Know earth and know heaven,
Then victory can be complete.”

— Sun Tzu 孙武 544 – 496 BCE via Denma Translation Group
(Sun Zi)
HIstory's supreme strategist
from Art of War 孙子兵法

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“The way of the superior man is hidden but becomes more prominent every day, whereas the way of the inferior man is conspicuous but gradually disappears.”

— Zisi 子思 481 – 402 BCE via Wing-Tsit Chan
(Kong Ji or Tzu-Ssu)
Confucius' grandson and early influence on Neo-Confucianism
from Doctrine of the Mean, Maintaining Perfect Balance, Zhongyong 中庸

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“Not too little, not too much: there safety lies.”

— Euripides 480 – 406 BCE
Ancient humanitarian influence continuing today

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“Who knoweth if to die be but to live, and that called life by mortals be but death?”

— Euripides 480 – 406 BCE
Ancient humanitarian influence continuing today

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“That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation”

— Euripides 480 – 406 BCE
Ancient humanitarian influence continuing today
from Trojan Women

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“When your mind is transparent to the depths and your words and actions are one, the whole world becomes transparent.”

— Chuang Tzu 莊周 369 – 286 BCE
(Zhuangzi)

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“No evil is honorable: but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.”

— Zeno Ζήνων ὁ Κιτιεύς 334 – 262 BCE
(of Citium)

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“Death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.”

— Koheleth 1
from Ecclesiastes קֹהֶלֶת‎

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“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.”

— Plutarch 46 – 120 CE
(Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus)

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“All life ends in death; every meeting ends in parting… so why grieve?”

— Kaṅkāripa ཀངྐཱ་རི་པ། 1
(”The Lovelorn Widower”)
Mahasiddha #7

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“Birth and death apply to everybody constantly, at this very moment.”

— Padmasambhava པདྨཱ་ཀ་ར། 1 via Chögyam Trungpa & Francesca Fremantle
("The Lotus-Born", Guru Rinpoche)
from Tibetan Book of the Dead

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“Today I cut down the tree of unknowing.”

— Cauraṅgipa ཙཽ་རངྒི་པ། 1 via Keith Dowman
("The Dismembered Stepson")
Mahasiddha #10
from Masters of Mahamudra

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“Taoists don’t avoid what others hate… They only avoid what others fight over, namely flattery and ostentation.”

— Lu Huiqing 1031 – 1111 CE

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“You should meditate on death without thinking of anything else, like a mother whose only child has died.”

— Gampopa སྒམ་པོ་པ། 1079 – 1153 CE via Herbert Guenther
(Sönam Rinchen, Dakpo Rinpoche)
from Jewel Ornament of Liberation

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“Those who cultivate the Tao yet still think about themselves are like people who overeat or overwork.”

— Li Xizhai 1 via Red Pine
(Li Hsi-Chai)
from Tao-te-chen-ching yi-chieh

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“Those who display themselves don’t shine for long. Those who flatter themselves don’t succeed for long. And those who parade themselves don’t lead for long”

— Wu Cheng 吴澄 1249 – 1333 CE via Red Pine
"Mr. Grass Hut"
from Tao-te-chen-ching-chu

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“Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption. ”

— Ibn Khaldun أبو زيد عبد الرحمن بن محمد بن خلدون الحضرمي 1332 – 1406 CE

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“As long as a human being worries about when he will die, and what he has that is his, all of his works are zero.”

— Kabīr कबीर 1399 – 1448 CE

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“This is the real fear presaging my dying: what if my fire be only straw and flame?”

— Gaspara Stampa 1523 – 1554 CE via Jane Tylus
from The Complete Poems

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“A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”

— Montaigne 1533 – 1592 CE
Grandfather of the Enlightenment
from Essays, French Essais

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“A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”

— Montaigne 1533 – 1592 CE
Grandfather of the Enlightenment

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“People raise themselves up on their tiptoes to see over the heards of others,but they cannot stand like ths for long.”

— Deqing 1546 – 1623 CE
(Te-Ch’ing)

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“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.”

— John Donne 1572 – 1631 CE
from Songs and Sonnets

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“The art of letting things alone… Remedies often make diseases worse… It takes a wise doctor to know when not to prescribe, and at times the greater skill consists in not applying remedies.”

— Balthasar Gracian 1601 – 1658 CE

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“If you don’t take the thought of death to heart, your spiritual practice will stray into conceit, arrogance, and materialism.”

— Karma Chagme Rinpoche I ཀརྨ་ཆགས་མེད་རཱ་ག་ཨ་སྱས། 1613 – 1678 CE via Shan Dao

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“We never came into being and we never go out of being. All of these coming and goings are just pulses in the pattern. ”

— Bankei 盤珪永琢 1622 – 1693 CE
(Bankei Yōtaku)

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“Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.”

— Matsuo Bashō 松尾 芭蕉 1644 – 1694 CE

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“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies.”

— Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 1694 – 1778 CE

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“He who moves not forward, goes backward.”

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1749 – 1832 CE

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“Expect poison from the standing water.”

— William Blake 1757 – 1827 CE

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“The charlatan… is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860 CE

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“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

— Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886 CE

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“to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry.”

— Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886 CE

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“We must die to one life before we can enter another.”

— Anatole France 1844 – 1924 CE
(Jacques Anatole Thibault)

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“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

— Henri-Louis Bergson 1859 – 1941 CE
from Creative Evolution

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“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

— Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941 CE

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“The road to success is always under construction”

— J. D. (Jake) Sandefer 1868 – 1940 CE

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“The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”

— Willa Cather 1873 – 1948 CE
Modern day Lao Tzu

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“Introverts are educators and promoters of culture who show and value the interior life which is painfully wanting in our civilization.”

— Carl Jung 1875 – 1961 CE
Insightful shamanistic scientist

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“For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.”

— Hermann Hesse 1877 – 1962 CE

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“death is the regular, indispensable condition of the replacement of one individual by another along a phyletic stem. Death - the essential lever in the mechanism and upsurge of life.”

— Teilhard de Chardin 1881 – 1955 CE via Bernard Wall
from Phenomenon of Man

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“'Oh Tigger, where are your manners?' 'I don’t know, but I bet they’re having more fun than I am.'”

— A.A. Milne 1882 – 1956 CE
(Alan Alexander Milne)
from Winnie the Pooh

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“The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.”

— Kahlil Gibran 1883 – 1931 CE

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“When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt 1884 – 1962 CE

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“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. — John the Savage”

— Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE
from Brave New World

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“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market.”

— Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 CE
One of the most powerful voices of his era promoting the true personal freedom beyond social, political, religious, and national belief systems
from Art of Loving

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“Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.”

— Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 CE
One of the most powerful voices of his era promoting the true personal freedom beyond social, political, religious, and national belief systems

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“Man’s main task is to give birth to himself.”

— Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 CE
One of the most powerful voices of his era promoting the true personal freedom beyond social, political, religious, and national belief systems

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“The Sioux have a name for white men. They call the wasicun – fat takers…Americans are bred like stuffed geese – to be consumers, not human beings… Some cruel child has stuffed a cigar into their mouths and they have to keep puffing and puffing until they explode.”

— John Fire Lame Deer 1903 – 1976 CE via Richard Erdoes
from Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

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“Death is the only wise advisor that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong…, turn to your death and ask if that is so.”

— Carlos Castaneda 1925 – 1998 CE
from Journey to Ixtlan

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“life is a day, a passage through green where light is more certain than leaves”

— Gesshin Myoko Roshi 1931 – 1999 CE
Moon heart miraculous light
from A Sudden Flash of Lightening: Words Out of Silence

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“To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.”

— Pema Chödrön 1936 CE –
(Deirdre Blomfield-Brown)
First American Vajrayana nun
from When Things Fall Apart

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“Death can be regarded as a way of extending ourselves into the next life… as some kind of invitation to allow this thing we cherish so very much called our body, to perish.”

— Chögyam Trungpa 1939 – 1987 CE via Carolyn Rose Gimian
from The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa

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“He feels the joy and sorrow of love in everything he does. He feels hot and cold, sweet and sour, simultaneously. Whether things go well or things go badly, whether there is success or failure, he feels sad and delighted at once.”

— Chögyam Trungpa 1939 – 1987 CE
from Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

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“He not busy being born is busy dying.”

— Bob Dylan 1941 CE –

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“Live everyday as if it were your last because someday you're going to be right.”

— Muhammad Ali 1942 – 2016 CE
(Cassius Clay)

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