A Quote by John Shelby Spong

I prepare for death by living. — © John Shelby Spong
I prepare for death by living.
Death is more certain than the morrow, than night following day, than winter following summer. Why is it then that we prepare for the night and for the winter time, but do not prepare for death. We must prepare for death. But there is only one way to prepare for death - and that is to live well.
Prepare your hearts for Death's cold hand! prepare Your souls for flight, your bodies for the earth; Prepare your arms for glorious victory; Prepare your eyes to meet a holy God! Prepare, prepare!
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, but when it comes a stranger.
This is the real and urgent reason why we must prepare now to meet death wisely, to transform our karmic future, and to avoid the tragedy of falling into delusion again and again and repeating the painful round of birth and death. This life is the only time and place we can prepare in, and we can only truly prepare through spiritual practice: This is the inescapable message of the natural bardo of this life.
Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.
I don't necessarily view death as something negative. Death gives meaning to life. Living in fear of death is living in denial. Actually, it's not really living at all, because there is no life without death. It's two sides of the one. You can't pick up one side and say, I'm just going to use the 'heads' side. No. It doesn't work like that. You have to pick up both sides because nothing is promised to anyone in this world besides death.
When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment.
You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clearheaded. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.
In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace. The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstances can it be neglected.
Of death, my father has always said that the best conditions are the ones in which you have plenty of time to prepare - to say what you need to say; to arrange your estate - and the ones in which you get to choose, or at least have some knowledge of, how and when it might happen. One can't elude death, but one can have a good death.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying says that death is the graduation ceremony, while living is just a long course in learning and preparing for the next journey. If we acknowledge death as the beginning, then how can we fear it?
Where there's life, death is inevitable. Dying's easy; it's living that's hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living.
You must approach each test with the seriousness and passion that you would use to prepare to challenge your death. You must prepare-not to die- but to battle for your life in each moment with every faculty and power available to you.
Death is my son-in-law. Death is my heir. My daughter he hath wedded. I will die, And leave him all. Life, living, all is Death’s.
Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
I’m the god of funerals. I know every death custom in the world—how to die properly, how to prepare the body and soul for the afterlife. I live for death.” “You must be fun at parties,” I said.
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