Sherwin B. Nuland > Quotes

“The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that proceeded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we call all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“-when the human spirit departs, it takes with it the vital stuffing of life. Then, only the inanimate corpus remains, which is the least of all the things that make us human.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms. Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society’s, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

“The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Live

“The very old do not succomb to disease-they implode their way into eternity. (How We Die)”
― Sherwin B. Nuland

“For many of the dying, intensive care, with its isolation among strangers, extinguishes their hope of not being abandoned in the last hours. If fact, they are abandoned, to the good intentions of highly skilled professional personnel who barely know them.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland

“We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions upon trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died—in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death. ... In my professional and personal life, I have lived with the awareness of death's imminence for more than half a century, and labored in its constant presence for all but the first decade of that time.”
― Sherwin Nuland

“Though biomedical science has vastly increased mankind’s average life expectancy, the maximum has not changed in verifiable recorded history.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Hope can still exist even when rescue is impossible.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The dignity we create in the time allotted to us becomes a continuum with the dignity we achieve by the altruism of accepting the necessity of death.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Every life is different from any that has gone before it, and so is every death.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The lesson is never learned—there will always be those who persist in seeking the Fountain of Youth, or at least delaying what is irrevocably ordained.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Dying begins with the first act of life.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“We are not well served by being lulled into unjustified expectations.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

“The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. Ars moriendi as ars vivendi: The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland

“Leonardo, with his profound knowledge of art, commenced various undertakings, many of which he never completed, because it appeared to him that the hand could never give due perfection to the object or purpose which he had in his thoughts, or beheld in his imagination - since in his mind he frequently formed some difficult conception, so subtle and so wonderful that no hands, however excellent or able, could ever give it expression”
― Sherwin B. Nuland

“We live today in the era not of the art of dying, but of the art of saving life,”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

“There is no way to deter old age from its grim duty, but a life of accomplishment makes up in quality for what it cannot add in quantity.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Hope is an abstract word. In fact, it is more than just a word; hope is an abstruse concept, meaning different things to each of us during different times and circumstances of our lives. Even politicians know its hold on the human mind, and the mind of the electorate.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Before you conclude that your options are limited, you need evidence that you cannot do something, rather than just deciding that you cannot do it.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, The Art of Aging: A Doctor's Prescription for Well-Being

“Nature is being kind without knowing it, as nature can be cruel without knowing it.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The only certainty, whether spoken or not, is that the doctors, nurses, and technicians are fighting not only death but their own uncertainties as well. In most resuscitations, those can be narrowed down to two main questions: Are we doing the right things? and, Should we be doing anything at all?”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“When we mourn, it should be the loss of love that makes us grieve, not the guilt that we did something wrong.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Human beings are capable of the kind of love and loyalty that transcends not only the physical debasement but even the spiritual weariness of the years of sorrow.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter