I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no death the way we understood it. The body dies, but not the soul.

For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.

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.

Death is not painful. It is the most beautiful experience you will have.

It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.

It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

I was destined to work with dying patients. I had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I felt called to travel some 250,000 miles each year to hold workshops that helped people cope with the most painful aspects of life, death and the transition between the two.

The opinion which other people have of you is their problem, not yours.

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You're not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you're at peace with yourself. Learning life's lessons is not about making your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be.

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

I say to people who care for people who are dying, if you really love that person and want to help them, be with them when their end comes close. Sit with them - you don't even have to talk. You don't have to do anything but really be there with them.

Live, so you do not have to look back and say: 'God, how I have wasted my life.'

You win the victory when you yield to friends.

There is no success without hardship.

Success is dependent on effort.

Always desire to learn something useful.

Who seeks shall find.

A word does not frighten the man who, in acting, feels no fear.

To him who is in fear everything rustles.

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

Our happiness depends on wisdom all the way.

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.

Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.

Reason is God's crowning gift to man.

Wise thinkers prevail everywhere.

How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in the truth.

Old age and the passage of time teach all things.

Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all.

Trust dies but mistrust blossoms.

Quick decisions are unsafe decisions.

Money is the worst currency that ever grew among mankind. This sacks cities, this drives men from their homes, this teaches and corrupts the worthiest minds to turn base deeds.

Profit is sweet, even if it comes from deception.

If you were to offer a thirsty man all wisdom, you would not please him more than if you gave him a drink.

Wisdom outweighs any wealth.

A short saying often contains much wisdom.

Much wisdom often goes with fewest words.

All is disgust when a man leaves his own nature and does what is unfit.

The rewards of virtue alone abide secure.

War never takes a wicked man by chance, the good man always.

God's dice always have a lucky roll.

Without labor nothing prospers.

Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.