At Tomorrow we fill our Instagram page with inspiring quotes on death & life, love & loss, joy & pain, then & now, today & tomorrow.
It can be helpful to contemplate the words of great writers and artists during difficult times. These kinds of quotes on death could be shared at funerals and memorials, onto cards or a memorial website like this one we created for David Bowie, (which is part of our package.)
We have also put together a collection of poetry that might be comforting if you are after something slightly different from these thought-provoking quotes on death. And these words on stars and the universe.
We work closely with our families to help them create truly personal memorials and believe that taking time and doing what you believe is the best job possible, can feel like an act of love. The process itself can also be healing and help get you started on the oftentimes difficult job of saying goodbye.
Words and Quotes on death for funerals
“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a 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
“I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence”
– David Bowie
“There were tears and there was sadness and at the same time, there was a realization that ultimately, there’s no death. Who they were in their essence had not been destroyed.”
– Eckhart Tolle
“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”
– J. M. Barrie, ‘Peter Pan’
“Beginnings are usually scary and endings are usually sad, but it’s everything in between that makes it all worth living.”
– Bob Marley
“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
– William Shakespeare, Scene 2, ‘Romeo and Juliet’
“Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
Only from the heart can you touch the sky.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
– Rumi
“If I should die, and you should live, and time should gurgle on, and morn should beam, and noon should burn, as it has usual done;”
– Emily Dickinson
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
– Steve Jobs
“For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.”
– James Baldwin
“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp”
– Anne Lamott
“Death shows up to remind us to live more fully.”
– Oprah Winfrey
“Grief is the price we pay for love”
– Queen Elizabeth II
“Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.”
– Wes Moore, ‘The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates’
“The journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take.”
– JRR Tolkien, ‘The Return of the King’
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’”
– Sylvia Plath
“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die”
– Stephen King
“Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain.”
– Bob Dylan
“I wonder if the snow lovesthe trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”
– Lewis Carroll, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass’
“By becoming deeply aware of our mortality, we intensify our experience of every aspect of life”
– Robert Greene
“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
“No one here gets out alive”
– Jim Morrison
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