Regard yourself as one already dead, I say to myself, and you will not even feel the coming of death. Blunt the sting of death while you live, and when it comes it will have nothing left to sting you with.
Regard yourself every morning as a newborn miracle, and you will not feel old age.
Do not await the coming of death. For behold, death has already come and does not depart from you. Its teeth are ceaselessly in your flesh. That which lived before your birth, and which will outlive your death, is even now alive in you.
One night an angel unrolled the ribbon of time, whose end I could not see, and showed me on the ribbon two points, one beside the other. "The distance," he said, "between these two points — that is the length of your life."
— My life, then, has already passed, I cried out, and I must be ready for the journey. I must be like a diligent housewife, who spends this day cleaning her house and preparing gifts for tomorrow's feast.
Truly, the present day of all the sons of men is filled for the most part with care for the morrow. But few are they who believe in Thy promise and take thought for what will come on the morrow after death. Let my death, O Lord, be a last sigh not for this world but for the blessed and eternal Tomorrow.
Among the extinguished candles of my friends my own candle burns down. Do not be foolish, I rebuked myself, and do not grieve that the candle is burning down. Do you love your friends so little, that you fear to go after them, after the many who have departed? Grieve not that the candle is burning down, but that it leaves behind it a dim and smoky light.
My soul has grown accustomed to going out of the body every day and every night, and stretching herself to the borders of the universe. Grown so great, she feels the suns and moons swimming upon her like swans upon my lake. She shines through the suns and sustains life upon the earths. She holds the mountains and the seas; she governs the thunders and the winds. She fills the whole of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. And she returns for lodging to a cramped and crumbling dwelling on one of the earths. She returns into the body, which for a minute or two more she calls her own, and which like her shadow sways among the mounds of graves, among the caves of beasts, among the wails of cheated hopes.
I do not complain of death, O Living God; it does me no wrong. It is a scarecrow, which man has fashioned for himself. More strongly than anything on earth, death pushes me forward to meet Thee.
I had a walnut tree before my house, and death took it from me. I grieved against death and cursed it, saying: why did you not take me, you insatiable beast, but him, the sinless one?
But now I regard myself too as dead, and near to my walnut tree.
O my Immortal God, look with mercy upon a candle that is burning down. And purify its flame. For only a pure flame rises to Thy face, and enters into Thine eye, with which Thou beholdest the whole world.