Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?

Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

You may be reborn a thousand times, but you can never know the real, for only that which dies, that which comes to an end, can renew itself.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

The death of what's dead is the birth of what's living.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

The sun is new each day.

The young is always there to replace what we call the old. That's the process, even in nature.

Through the window I can see Rooks above the cherry-tree, Sparrows in the violet bed, Bramble-bush and bumble-bee, And old red bracken smoulders still Among boulders on the hill, Far too bright to seem quite dead. But old Death, who can't forget, Waits his time and watches yet, Waits and watches by the door.

Men in their generations are like the leaves of the trees. The wind blows and one year's leaves are scattered on the ground; but the trees burst into bud and put on fresh ones when the spring comes round.

Without death and decay, how could life go on?

I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time.

Everything that rises sets, and everything that grows, grows old.

Everything that has a beginning comes to an end.

Our business is with life, not death.

Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

Die and born again, die and born again. It's the story of my life.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.