Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) was a Swiss-born American psychiatrist. An innovator in the field of palliative care and near-death studies, she revolutionized attitudes toward the treatment of the terminally ill. An early and essential contributor to the death awareness movement, she is well known for her theory of the five stages of grief, also known as the “Kübler-Ross Model.”
Born in Zürich, Kübler-Ross was one of a set of triplets. She studied medicine at the university there and immigrated to America in 1958. During her psychiatric residency, she began giving a series of lectures inspiring medical students on managing terminally ill patients.
An instructor at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, Her extensive work with the dying led to the book On Death and Dying (1969.) It examined the process of dying, identifying five stages of emotion: denial, anger, bargaining with God, preparatory grief/depression, and acceptance.
Kübler-Ross is credited with facilitating the emerging hospice movement of the 1960s. She held controversial views on the afterlife, which dented her reputation in the 1980s. Other works include Living with Death and Dying (1981,) On Life after Death (1991,) and her autobiography, Wheel of Life (1997.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Medicine
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Goal, Life, Living, Mistakes, Learn, Purpose, Silence
How do the geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans, know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within, if only we would listen to it, that tells us so certainly when to go forth into the unknown.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Being True to Yourself
Negativity can only feed on negativity.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Responsibility
If we could raise one generation with unconditional love, there would be no Hitlers. We need to teach the next generation of children from Day One that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind’s greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Choice
There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Silence
As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don’t have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn’t matter as much as how you do what you do.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Service
Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Death and Dying
Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Guilt, Bereavement, One liners
It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Death and Dying
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shedding its cocoon. It is a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Death
Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: War
Our concern must be to live while we’re alive… to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Being Ourselves, Identity
There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Suffering
Death can show us the way, for when we know and understand completely that our time on this earth is limited, and that we have no way of knowing when it will be over, then we must live each day as if it were the only one we had.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Nature
For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Death
You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain and learn to accept it, not as a curse or punishment but as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Gift, Growth, Pain, Purpose, Experience, Will
People are like stained glass windows—the true beauty can be seen only when there is light from within. The darker the night, the brighter the windows.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Beauty
If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Life, Kindness, Love, Garden, Living
We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind’s greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Topics: Choice, Responsibility
The opinion which other people have of you is their problem, not yours.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Free choice is the greatest gift God gives to his children.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
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