Cycle of Existence Quotes

Our nature is the nature of no birth and no death. It is impossible for a cloud to pass from being into nonbeing. And that is true with a beloved person. They have not died. They have continued in many new forms and you can look deeply and recognize them in you and around you.

We clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us; we enter the little circle of each other's arms, and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance, and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

Life and death are the same...Leave karma to karma.

It is important to look at death because it is a part of life. It is a sad thing, melancholy but romantic at the same time. It is the end of a cycle - everything has to end. The cycle of life is positive because it gives room for new things.

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

At a personal level, as a Buddhist practitioner, I deliberately visualize and think about death in my daily practice. Death is not separated from our lives. Due to my research and thoughts about death, I have some guarantee and some conviction that it will be a positive experience.

Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.

Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation.

Death, like birth, is one of nature's mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same.

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again.

I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.

The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried.

Did my infancy succeed another age of mine that dies before it? Was it that which I spent within my mother's womb?... And what before that life again, O God of my joy, was I anywhere or in any body?

Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.

As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.

I don't want it all to be pretty - it's a combination of loss and gain. Things are born, live and hang in limbo. That's what life's about.

Live so that thou mayest desire to live again - that is thy duty - for in any case thou wilt live again!

Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state.

Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

Everything has been something before.

Life is a process of one goneness after another.

Death hath a thousand doors to let out life.