While some people collect things like baseball cards, matchbooks and menus, I have to confess I have a small and strange collection of my own: "exit lines"-the final utterances of the dying. My collection of quotes is not as morbid as you may think. They not only tell you how a man died, but they hint at how he lived. These last words are the bookend of the legacy a person leaves.
Author Henry David Thoreau was known as an irreverent and arrogant individualist. Shortly before he died, his aunt asked him if he'd made his peace with God. Thoreau responded, "I didn't know we'd ever quarreled."
Contrast Thoreau's cynicism with the inspiring last words of the great evangelist D. L. Moody. He was reported to have turned to his sons by his bedside and said, "If God be your partner, make your plans large."
Some last lines are ominous whispers of a feared fate. Others shout the confident message: "This isn't it! Death is not the end." Ponder the contrast in these famous last words:
Bring down the curtain-the farce is over.-Francois Rabelais, sixteenth-century French philosopher and comic
Our God is the God from whom cometh salvation. God is the Lord by whom we escape death.-Martin Luther
I am abandoned by God and man! I shall go to hell! O Christ, O Jesus Christ!-Voltaire
I enjoy heaven already in my soul. My prayers are all converted into praises.-Augustus Toplady, author of the great hymn "Rock of Ages"
I am convinced that there is no hope.-Winston Churchill, whose vision and battle cry in life was to "never give up."
I have pain-but I have peace, I have peace.-Richard Baxter, seventeenth-century Puritan theologian
What will be your final words? How do you want to be remembered? How is your life today an investment in the legacy you leave?
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