Sherwin B. Nuland Quotes

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

If we think that this life is all there is to life, then there is no interpretation of our problems, our pain, not even of our privileges. But everything changes when we open up to the possibility that God's story is really our story too.

What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death.

In that first blow to the deaf walls of those who have everything, the blood of our people, our blood, ran generously to wash away injustice. To live, we die. Our dead once again walked the way of truth. Our hope was fertilized with mud and blood.

Well, I think the main message is there is more to your story. There is more than what happens between the crib and the grave, and that is what I am really trying to speak to, this idea that all of life is this life and that there is nothing more than what we see and experience right here on this earth.

The meaning of life. The wasted years of life. The poor choices of life. God answers the mess of life with one word: 'grace.'

Why are we born? We're born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we're born and we die? We're born to live. One is a realist if one hopes.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question.

I don't know why I'm alive but I know there's a reason for it.

I have lived with passion and in a hurry, trying to accomplish too many things. I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992.

I try to write lyrics so that they won't age, which sort of leaves you with the big subjects like death and love and sex and violence.

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

We all have to die, and I preferred to have just one death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without response is to die many deaths.

In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization taht the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.

But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.

Is death that which gives meaning to life?

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

Without zest, what is life? Just waiting for death?

Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.

You're born, you die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation.

The way you get through tragedy is to look at the good things in life.