Quotes about Dying

as unknown, yet well-known; dying, and yet we live on; punished, yet not killed;

By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of Joseph’s sons and worshiped as he leaned on the top of his staff.

We think we are in the land of the living going to the land of the dying. But really we are in the land of the dying, going to the land of the living.

if we do not believe that, and if our Christian hope, tempered by sophistication, does not allow us to offer that truth to a dying, convulsing world then we are indeed, as the apostle Paul said, of all men most miserable.

Modern humanity does not perceive the world as worth God dying for. We Christians must demonstrate it.

Realistic hope permits a dying person to confront reality, but at the same time gives strength to go on living.

And all the while one spirit uttered this, The other one did weep so, that, for pity, I swooned away as if I had been dying, And fell, even as a dead body falls.

So heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate, Giving to death, and dying to redeem, So dearly to redeem what hellish hate So easily destroy'd, and still destroys, In those who, when they may, accept not grace.

Current religiosity and ethics, especially those that replace the story of the cross with demands for social reform, have produced many a theology of glory. It still flourishes along with its attendant despair. There is no cure through the law. It will take some dying. So we are already on the way to the cross.

Everyone, it seems, wants to do God the favor of making him less objectionable. Some say he is not absolute or omnipotent yet but is perhaps in the process of becoming so. Some say he is not infinite, but finite. Some even say he has obliged us all by dying!

Those things which seem to take meaning away from human life include not only suffering but dying as well. I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.

The question which beset me was, "Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.