Top 100 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We point to our unhappy circumstances to rationalize our negative feelings. This is the easy way out. It takes, after all, very little effort to feel victimized.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

52. “Death is the final stage of growth in this life. There is no total death. Only the body dies. The self or the spirit, or whatever you may wish to label it, is eternal. You may interpret this in any way that makes you comfortable.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

53. “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 Kübler-Ross

54. “Memories are the only real gifts we can leave our children.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

55. “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.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

56. “As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don’t have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn’t matter as much as how you do what you do.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

57. “When you learn your lessons, the pain goes away.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

58. “Every individual human being born on this earth has the capacity to become a unique and special person, unlike any who has ever existed before or ever will exist again.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

59. “We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

60. “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 Kübler-Ross

61. “Throughout life, we get clues that remind us of the direction we are supposed to be headed if you stay focused, then you learn your lessons.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

62. “I was educated in line with the basic premise: work work work. You are only a valuable human being if you work. This is utterly wrong. Half working, half dancing – that is the right mixture. I myself have danced and played too little.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

63. “Mourning can go on for years and years. It doesn’t end after a year, that’s a false fantasy. It usually ends when people realize that they can live again, that they can concentrate their energies on their lives as a whole, and not on their hurt, and guilt and pain.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

64. “There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

65. “Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

66. “I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever. If you live each day of your life right, then you have nothing to fear.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

67. “To love means not to impose your own powers on your fellow man but offer him your help. And if he refuses it, to be proud that he can do it on his own strength.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

68. “People after death become complete again. The blind can see, the deaf can hear, cripples are no longer crippled after all their vital signs have ceased to exist.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

69. “There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame that heats our soul, energizes our spirit, and supplies passion to our lives.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

70. “If, on the other hand, you listen to your own inner voice, to your own inner wisdom, which is far greater than anyone else’s as far as you are concerned, you will not go wrong, and you will know what to do with your life. Then time is no longer relevant.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

71. “When you spend your life doing what you love to do, you are nourishing your Soul. It matters not what you do, only that you love whatever you happen to do.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

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

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

73. “Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you’ve lived.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

74. “Our only purpose in life is growth.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

75. “I’m going to dance in all the galaxies.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

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

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

77. “Old age is not synonymous with being ‘glad to die.’”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

78. “I think modern medicine has become like a prophet offering a life free of pain. It is nonsense. The only thing I know that truly heals people is unconditional love.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

79. “I think that as you evolve spiritually, automatically your body tells you what is acceptable for your body and what is not.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

80. “It is my conviction that it is the intuitive, spiritual aspects of us humans-the inner voice-that gives us the ‘knowing,’ the peace, and the direction to go through the windstorms of life, not shattered but whole, joining in love and understanding.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

81. “Death is the great transition.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

82. “We cannot find peace if we are afraid of the windstorms of life.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

83. “I look for mystery and try to decipher it while knowing it is an impossible task. I look for memory, where Mystery lies.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

84. “Grief will happen either as an open healing wound or a closed festering wound, either honestly or dishonestly, either appropriately or inappropriately. But emotions will be expressed.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

85. “We all have to go through the tumbler a few times before we can emerge as a crystal.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

86. “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.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

87. “I believe every person has a guardian spirit or angel. They assist us in the transition between life and death and they also help us pick our parents before we are born.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

88. “I am an artist because the knot is so powerful I just can not, nor want to be, anything else or do anything else.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

89. “I once considered writing a book called I’m not OK and you’re not OK, and that’s OK.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

90. “How do the geese know when to fly to the sun?”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

91. “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 Kübler-Ross

92. “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 Kübler-Ross

93. “Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

94. “It’s not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather our concern must be to live while we’re alive.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

95. “The only incontrovertible fact of my work is the importance of life.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

96. “If you are ready for mystical experiences, you have them.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

97. “Paul Brunton’s Notebooks are a veritable treasure-trove of philosophic-spiritual wisdom.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

98. “Even though I had a good income from my lectures, no one would give me a loan. The insanity almost drove me to sympathize with the feminist movement.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

99. “I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience – to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

100. “A woman needs to know about blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol. And she needs to know the kinds of things she can do to stay healthy.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross