The following are quotations and selections that people may
wish to think about, or use in their own newsletters, etc.

Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,
Or any searcher know by mortal mind;
Veil upon veil will lift but there must be
Veil upon veil behind.
(Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia).

The wise man looks not to how long he lives,
But to how he dies. For him death has no terrors,
Because it is the day of his birth to immortal life.
And he will be mindful of those he has left behind,
And will commune with them.
(Seneca).

For to fear death, Gentlemen, is nothing else than
To think one is wise when one is not: for it is
Thinking one knows what one does not.
(Plato).

It is all very well for you, who have probably never
seen any spiritual manifestations, to talk as you do; but
if you had seen what I have witnessed you would hold a
different opinion.
(W. M. Thackeray).

One short sleep past we wake eternally:-
And death shall be no more; death thou shalt die.
(John Donne).

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead:
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire,
Beyond the language of the living.
(T. S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding', Four Quartets).

It is a stupid presumption to go about despising and
condemning as false anything that seems to us improbable;
this is a common fault in those who think they have more
intelligence than the crowd.
(Michel Eyquem (1533-1592), Michel De Montaigne: Essays).

Neither a man nor a nation can live without a higher idea,
and there is only one such idea on earth, that of an immortal
human soul; all the other higher ideas by which men live follow
from that.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky).

The boundaries between Life and Death are at best shadowy
and vague. Who shall say where one ends, and the other begins?
(Edgar Allan Poe).

People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are
unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see
one in all and all in one is to break through the great
barrier which narrows one's perception of reality.
(Thich Nhat Hanh).

And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.
(Rupert Brooke).

And what shall we know of this life on earth after death?
The dissolution of our timebound form in eternity brings no
loss of meaning. Rather, does the little finger know itself
a member of the hand.
(Carl Jung).

Many people judge this aspect of Spiritualism [physical
mediumship] harshly, but if one stops to consider the number
of bad popes and charlatan evangelists, perhaps Spiritualism
has not done so badly after all.
(Allen Spraggett, The Unexplained).

The world seems marvellously convincing until death collapses
the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place.
(David Darling, After Life).

I know transplanted, human worth will grow to profit
otherwhere.
(Tennyson).

A son reported that his mother, in the moments immediately
before she died, looked upward and said: "Oh, it's so
beautiful!".
(Adventures In Immortality).

Where should be be if we set ourselves to deny everything we
do not know how to explain?
(Arago).

That which we call death, is but the other side of life.
(Ramacharaka).

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man
does with what happens to him.
(Aldous Huxley).

Death can be understood
as the passage from one form to another,
from a limited degree of life to another higher, freer one.
It is wrong to assume that everything ends with death;
what ends is only the temporary conditions
in which people have lived on earth...
(Peter Deunov).

From delusion lead me to Truth,
From darkness lead me to Light,
From death lead me to Immortality.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

Unquestionably the truth or fallacy of the theory of the
survival of the soul is by far the most tremendous
question that can exercise the human mind. The more you
think of it, the more all other questions seem to sink into
utter insignificance, for only if survival be true, can the
Universe be rationalized at all....
(Professor E. W. MacBride, F.R.S., Psychic Science).

A Dog on a Euthanasia Table
(Author Unknown)
I am trembling and so worried, for I know I misbehaved,
I chewed Dad's brand new slippers and saw just how he raged,
I did not mean to wreck them, but my teeth were very sore,
And chewing them relieved the pain and made me feel less bored.
And when Mom came to smack me, I wet on the floor,
For I had held it in all day, and could not get out the door.
They said that I was "wicked", a menace at first glance,
And when they tied me up outside, I howled for one more chance,
Rolled over and sat pretty and did all those tricks they loved.
But they could not forget the wrong and said they had had
enough,
So they took me to a clinic, where the smell alone put fear,
Into my trembling body, but my cries they did not hear.
For they turned and walked out through the door without a hug
or a pat,
I wonder if they will forget and forgive me when they come
back.
But why do I feel so frightened, as though they've gone for
good?
They said they'd love me 'till I died, they really said they
would.
I am strapped onto a table, and they are shaving my front leg,
I think I am getting a needle now, I feel it in my vein...
And why do I feel so lonely, without them comforting me?
And why do I feel so sleepy?
Oh please, God, I hope they will forgive me.

Nowadays a miracle or paranormal phenomena not only runs
counter to all our everyday experiences, more importantly
it appears to threaten the entire closely woven fabric of
modern science. For it presents us with a new class of
phenomena which science has not only never led us to expect
but appears powerless to assimilate.
(Dr John Beloff).

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
(Matthew Arnold).

Death opens unknown doors.
(John Masefield).

Ghost stories are always listened to and well received in
private, but pitilessly disavowed in public. For my own part,
ignorant as I am of the way in which the human spirit enters
the world and the way in which he goes out of it, I dare not
deny the truth of many such narratives.
(Immanuel Kant).

We are both onlookers and actors in the great drama of
existence.
(Niels Bohr).

At some future day it will be proved, I cannot say when and
where, that the human soul is, while in earth life, already in
an uninterrupted communication with those living in another
world.
(Immanuel Kant).

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do
not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards
return again. Nothing is dead.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson).

It were better to live one single day in the pursuit of
understanding and meditation, than to live a hundred years in
ignorance and unrestraint.
(The Buddha).

It is possible that there exist emanations that are still
unknown to us. Do you remember how electrical currents and
unseen waves were laughed at? The knowledge about man is still
in its infancy.
(Albert Einstein).

No choice is uninfluenced by the way in which the personality
regards its destiny, and the body its death.
In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which
decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.
(Dag Hammarskjold, United Nations Secretary-General).

Science has, after all, made some colossal blunders in the
past... Our current materialism and its rejection of the idea
of a spirit or soul might be just another great falsity.
(Dr Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live).

I am afraid that we shall have a very considerable amount of
psychological baggage to take with us if we do survive [death];
and we shall be wise to take a little trouble, while we still
can, to insure that it is of a desirable kind.
(Prof. H. H. Price, The Journal of Parapsychology)
24(3), September 1966).

I want you to know it's exciting...to be dead. But we are not
the dead ones, you are the dead ones...because you are only
firing on two cylinders. I want so much to tell you about a
world where everybody is out to create a greater sense of love
and harmony....
(Post-mortem communication of Jim Pike to his father Bishop
James Pike. The Other Side).

The only word I seem to be able to use to talk about that place
is beautiful...As I stood there in the middle of this lush
green field, I could see animals, flowers, and trees...I saw
children playing. God, it was beautiful.
(Kenneth G's experience during a near-death experience, You
Cannot Die, by Ian Currie).

Think not disdainfully of death,
But look upon it with favour.
For even death is one of the things,
That Nature wills.
(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations).

Death borders upon our birth,
And our cradle stands in the grave.
(Richard Barnfield, Epistles).

I shall hear in Heaven.
(Beethoven, referring to his deafness).

Death is the supreme festival
on the road to freedom.
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison).

The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.
(Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici).

If life must not be taken too seriously,
Then neither must death.
(Samuel Butler, Notebooks.

To die is to leave off dying and do the thing once and for all.
(Samuel Butler, Notebooks).

I am ready to meet my Maker: whether my Maker is prepared for
the ordeal of meeting me is another mattter.
(Winston Churchill on his 75th birthday).

Why, do you not know then, that the origin of all human evils,
and of all baseness, and of cowardice, is not death, but rather
the fear of death?
(Epicetus, Discourses).

What good can come of meeting death with tears?
If a man is sorry for himself, he doubles seath.
(Euripides, Alcestis).

It hath often been said,
That it is not death,
But dying,
Which is terrible.
(Henry Fielding, Amelia).

Our final experience like our first is conjectural.
We move between two darknesses.
(E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel).

Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
(Charles Frohman. Last words before going down on the
Lusitania).

If you would behold the spirit of death,
open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one,
even as the river and sea are one.
(Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet).

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which
decides the answers to all the questions that life puts to us.
(Dag Hammarskjold, Diaries).

To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious,
to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.
(Carl Jung. Quoted Miguel Serrano).

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely
vulgarising.
(Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza).

Teach me to live,
That I may dread,
The grave as little,
As my bed.
(Bishop Thomas Ken. Glory to Thee, My God, This Night).

The only religious way to think of death is as part and
parcel of life.
(Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain).

Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die.
(John Masefield, Pompey the Great).

And may we find when ended is the page,
Death but a tavern on our pilgrimage.
(John Masefield, The Word).

And to the faithful: death, the gate of life.
(John Milton, Paradise Lost).

We die only once: and for such a long time.
(Moliere, Le Depit Amoureux).

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not
be an even greater one.
(Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire).

Christianity has made death a terror, that was unknown to
the calmness of pagans.
(Ouida, The Failure of Christianity).

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the sea;
they live in one another still.
(William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude).

If thou expect death as a friend, prepare to entertain it.
If thou expect death as an enemy, prepare to overcome it.
Death has no advantage, except when it comes as a stranger.
(Francis Quarles, Enchiridion).

Death is sometimes a punishment, often a gift: to many it
has been a favour.
(Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus).

Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.
(George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman).

Nobody knows what death is, nor whether to man it is
perchance the greatest of blessings; yet people fear it as
if they surely knew it to be the worst of evils.
(Socrates).

Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike,
whose peace and whose refuge are for us all.
The soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor,
the loved and the unloved.
(Mark Twain, on his deathbed).

Death helps us to see what is worth trusting and loving,
and what is a waste of time.
(J. Neville Ward, Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy).

Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings;
they are other nations caught up with ourselves in the net of
life and time; fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail
of the earth.
(Henry Boston, The Outermost House).

Many years ago when an adored dog died, a good friend who was
a bishop, said to me: Remember that as far as the Bible is
concerned, God only threw the humans out of paradise.
(Bruce Foyle, Pets and Their People).

I really don't think I could consent to go to Heaven
if I thought there were no animals there.
(George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion).

Nothing keeps people together like the exalted conviction
that they alone are to be spared that eternal anguish of
hell fire to which everyone else will be condemned.
(Polly Toynbee, The Daily Telegraph, 25/03/79).

Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the Last Judgement draweth nigh.
(William Blake, 'Auguries of Innocence').

Don't wait for the Last Judgement;
It takes place every day.
(Albert Camus, The Fall).

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding
everything I cannot explain as a fraud.
(C. G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche).

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
(Fran Lebowitz: quoted John Heilpern, The Observer).

It is now clear that science is incapable ofd ordering life.
A life is ordered by values.
(Jawaharlal Nehru).

Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two
awakenings.
(Eugene O'Neill, Marco Millions).

Life is an unanswered question, but lets still believe in the
dignity and importance of the question.
(Tennessee Williams, Camino Real).

These phenomena are, in the most profound sense of that word,
scandalous. They are both signs and symbols of a specter that
haunts the strongholds of science: the specter of the direct power
of mind and imagination to transform the real world.
(Anita Gregory referring to phenomena produced by physical
mediumship in The Strange Case of Rudi Schneider).

