Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brains cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.

A realistic expectation also demands our acceptance that one's allotted time on earth must be limited to an allowance consistent with the continuity of our species... We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions and 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.

The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science

For aging is an art. The years between its first intimations and the time of the ultimate letting go of all earthly things can-if the readiness and resolve are there-be the real harvest of our lives.

If we cannot heal in one way, we must learn to heal in another.

The dignity we seek in dying is not to be found in our final weeks, days or moments but in the way we live and how we are seen by those people whose lives we affect.