16 Quotes Reflecting on Death Through Metaphors

Clouds in the sky, dew on a leaf, flight into the sky: Death can be difficult to comprehend in many ways. Sometimes a metaphor can best help those who have lost loved ones  capture feelings about life and death.

1.“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”

– Rabindranath Tagore

2. “All the beauty of this world is wet with the dew of tears.”

– Theodor Haecker

3. “Should you shield the valleys from the windstorms, you would never see the beauty of their canyons.”

– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

4. “Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”

– Rabindranath Tagore

5. “Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to the mystery why we climb.”

– Greg Child

6. “When once you have tasted flight, you will always walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward: for there you have been and there you will always be.”

– Henry Van Dyke

7. “When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm’s all about.”

– Haruki Murakami

8. “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.”

– François de La Rochefoucauld

9. “If you would indeed 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 the sea are one.”

– Kahlil Gibran

10. “Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.”

– Delmore Schwartz

11. “Even the most profound darkness is a longing for light.”

– Jeff Foster

12. “For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”

– Kahlil Gibran

13. “This grand show is eternal. The dew is never dried all at once; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

– John Muir

14. “Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.”

-Rabindranath Tagore

15. “He made death his ladder to the skies.”

-Edmund Spenser

16. “Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

– George Bernard Shaw