Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross Quotes

“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

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

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“It is very important that you only do what you love to do. you may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do. Otherwise, you will live your life as a prostitute, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived. and you will not have a pleasant death.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

There is within each one of us a potential for goodness beyond our imagining; for giving which seeks no reward; for listening without judgment; for loving unconditionally.

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

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
that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“We think sometimes we're only drawn to the good, but we're actually drawn to the authentic. We like people who are real more than those who hide their true selves under layers of artificial niceties”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“When I die I'm going to dance first in all the galaxies ... I'm gonna play and dance and sing.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“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

“There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt. It's true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear. But it's more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They're opposites. If we're in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we're in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“Lots of my dying patients say they grow in bounds and leaps, and finish all the unfinished business. But assisting a suicide is cheating them of these lessons, like taking a student out of school before final exams. That's not love, it's projecting your own unfinished business”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“Everything in this life has a purpose, there are no mistakes, no coincidences.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“If we could raise one generation with unconditional love, there would be no Hitlers. We need to teach the next generation of children from Day One that they are responsible for their lives.
Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“My patients taught me not how to die, but how to live.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive
a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“It is very important that you do only what you love to do. You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may live in a shabby place, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days, you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“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

“Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross

“The beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.”

— Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross