Explore our collection of end of life quotes to help you navigate the end of life journey and to reflect on the meaning of life and death.
End of life refers to the final stage in an individual’s life, when the body is no longer able to sustain itself and death is imminent. It is a time of physical, emotional and spiritual transition for both the person who is dying and their loved ones.
During the end of life, the focus shifts from trying to cure or treat the person’s illness to providing comfort and support. This can include managing pain and symptoms, as well as addressing emotional and spiritual needs. The goal of end of life care is to help the person live as fully and comfortably as possible until they die.
It can be a difficult time for everyone involved, and it is important to have a support system in place. This can include family, friends, and professionals who can provide emotional and practical support. Grief and loss are normal reactions to the death of a loved one, and it is important to allow yourself time to process your feelings.
In this article, we will explore some of the most meaningful and powerful end of life quotes. These quotes come from a wide range of sources, from philosophers and religious leaders to poets and novelists, and they offer a diverse array of perspectives on death and the end of life. Read on and enjoy our collection of end of life quotes:
End of life quotes inspirational
Check out these end of life quotes that offer guidance and insight into the journey that lies ahead:
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
Helen Keller
Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows.
Pope Paul VI
In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
Abraham Lincoln
Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.
Rumi
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Mark Twain
Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shedding its cocoon. It is a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.
Elisabeth Kubler–Ross
Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.
Richard Bach
Our worst fear isn’t the end of life but the end of memories.
Tom Rachman
End of life quotes
These end of life quotes offer a glimpse into the thoughts and can provide solace for those who are currently on this journey:
At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done. We will be judged by “I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in.
Mother Teresa
Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.
James Dean
One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching.
Gerard Way
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
Norman Cousins
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Mahatma Gandhi
You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die.
Cicely Saunders
Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.
Marcus Aurelius
Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.
Albert Einstein
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Epicurus
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end.
Gilda Radner
Deep end of life quotes
End of life is a time for letting go, and these deep end of life quotes provide a reminder to appreciate the beauty in the world and the people around us:
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me’.
Erma Bombeck
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
George Eliot
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C. S. Lewis
Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, ‘Did you bring joy?’ The second was, ‘Did you find joy?’
Leo Buscaglia
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
Leonardo da Vinci
Grief is not a disorder, a disease or sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.
Earl A Grollman
Death is the most misunderstood phenomenon. People have thought of death as the end of life. That is the first, basic misunderstanding.
Rajneesh
I see light at the end of the tunnel.
Walt Whitman Rostow
All growth starts at the end of your comfort zone.
Tony Robbins
At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.
Barbara Bush
Motivational end of life quotes
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Pablo Picasso
Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.
Benjamin Franklin
I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
Diane Ackerman
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined…
Henry David Thoreau
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde
Hope is sweet. Hope is illumining. Hope is fulfilling. Hope can be everlasting. Therefore, do not give up hope, Even in the sunset of your life.
Sri Chinmoy
What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money.
George Leigh Mallory
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Neale Donald Walsch
Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.
Nelson Mandela
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
Og Mandino
Quotes about end of life
Man comes from a drop of semen and leaves as a piece of dust. He doesn’t know when he came and he doesn’t know when he’s leaving, yet he walks on the earth thinking he knows everything.
Ali ibn Abi Talib
Man who is created alone should be aware that he will also die alone. Yet during his life, he lives almost addicted to possessions… the only assets one can take with him when one dies is one’s belief or disbelief
Harun Yahya
Be prepared to ride the cycles and trends of life; success is never permanent, and failure is never final.
Brian Tracy
We enjoy this illusion of continuity and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn’t the end of life, but the end of memories
Tom Rachman
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Be certain that you do not die without having done something wonderful for humanity.
Maya Angelou
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
Thomas Huxley
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.
Victor Hugo
Ending of life quotes
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.
Washington Irving
Thou water turn’st to wine, fair friend of life;
Thy foe, to cross the sweet arts of Thy reign,
Distils from thence the tears of wrath and strife,
And so turns wine to water back again.
Richard Crashaw
It were well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be none.
Marcus Aurelius
You walk through a series of arches, so to speak, and then, presently, at the end of a corridor, a door opens and you see backward through time, and you feel the flow of time, and realize you are only part of a great nameless procession.
John Huston
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
Having the choice at the end of my life has become incredibly important. It has given me a sense of peace during a time that otherwise would be dominated by fear, uncertainty and pain.
Brittany Maynard
In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive. And at the end of life, we need others to survive. But here’s the secret, in between, we need others as well.
Morrie Schwartz
Are all ends of life so sad?
Marie of Romania
The end of life is to be like unto God; and the soul following God, will be like unto Him; He being the beginning, middle, and end of all things.
Socrates
All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.
Ernest Hemingway
Final goodbye end of life quotes
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
Semisonic
Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.
William Shakespeare
It’s sad, but sometimes moving on with the rest of your life, starts with goodbye.
Carrie Underwood
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.
Dr. Seuss
The story of life is quicker than the blink of an eye. The story of love is hello, goodbye.
Jimi Hendrix
There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart.
Mahatma Gandhi
To die and part is a less evil; but to part and live, there, there is the torment.
George Lansdowne
Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable.
The Wizard of Oz
The two hardest things to say in life is hello for the first time and goodbye for the last.
Moira Rogers
It’s sad, but sometimes moving on with the rest of your life, starts with goodbye.
Carrie Underwood
End of life quotes short
The end of life is not the end of living, but the end of one chapter. These end of life quotes offer a message of hope and an encouragement to find peace and joy in the journey, and to live life fully until the end:
I can tell you that the end of life is the some of the love that was lived in it.
Cassandra Clare
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Mark Twain
Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end.
Gilda Radner
I am a friend of life, at 80 life tells me to behave like a woman and not like an old woman.
Chavela Vargas
The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.
T. S. Eliot
The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
Mahatma Gandhi
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Death is a release from and an end of all pains.
Seneca the Younger
How deceitful hope may be, yet she carries us on pleasantly to the end of life.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Dying end of life quotes
This list of dying end of life quotes offers some range of perspectives on the meaning of life, the process of dying, and the impact of death on those left behind:
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
Isaac Asimov
It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.
Samuel Johnson
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Jean Cocteau
If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.
Laozi
Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.
Emily Dickinson
A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
Stewart Alsop
Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.
Andrew Sachs
Someone has somewhere commented on the fact that millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
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-Exupery
Don’t try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.
Blaise Pascal
Final thought
These end of life quotes can serve as a source of inspiration and reflection for those who are dying, as well as their loved ones. They can also help to put life into perspective, and remind us of the importance of cherishing the time we have.
Hope you have enjoyed our collection of end of life quotes. We believe that these quotes provide valuable insights and perspectives on this important topic. If there are any quotes that resonate with you, share them with others. By sharing these end of life quotes, we hope to contribute to that conversation in a meaningful way.
Finally, end of life can be a difficult and emotional time, but it is also an opportunity to reflect on our lives and the impact we have had on the world. It is a time to say goodbye to loved ones and to make peace with the past.
Though the end of life can be difficult, it is also a time to celebrate the life that has been lived and to find comfort in the memories that will be cherished forever. With the right support and perspective, end of life can be a time of healing and growth for both the individual experiencing it and their loved ones.