Not a quote as such but a short passage from one of my favourite books called "The Slight Edge".
What I Learned from My Own Funeral
The article was about funerals, and it informed me [author] that at the average funeral, about ten people cry.
I couldn't believe it. Ten people? That's it? You mean, I go through my entire life, spend years and years going through all these trials and tribulations and achievements and joys and heartbreaks--and at the end of it, there are only ten people who care enough to cry?
I went on to the next paragraph. It got worse.
Once those ten (or fewer) people had yanked their hankies and honked their noses, the article told me, and my funeral was over, the number one factor that would determine how many people would go on from the funeral to attend the actual burial would be... the weather. (The weather?!) If it happened to be raining, it said, fifty percent of the people who attend my funeral would decide not to go to my burial after all.
I really couldn't believe it. You mean, I'm lying there, at the grand conclusion of everything I've ever said and done, of everything I call my life, in those final moments when my entire life is called to account and acknowledged and memorialized by those nearest and dearest to me, those whose lives I've most deeply and profoundly touched... and half the congregation checks out halfway through because of the weather?!
At first, this really bummed me out.
And then, it was liberating.
You know what? I thought. I don't give a damn what anybody things of what I'm doing any more. If the odds are that iffy as to whether or not they even cry at my funeral, and chances are fifty-fifty that they duck out anyway before I'm planted if the sky happens to cry for me more than the people do... then why am I spending so much time worrying about what they're thinking now?
Why would I be afraid of rejection? Why would I be concerned about what the majority thinks? Why would I be worried about what the ninety-five percent say, think, or do?
Facing some truths about one's own death can also bring one face to face with some important truths about one's life. Reading that article enlarged my comfort zone, and gave me an edge of courage--just a tiny edge, but an edge I hadn't had before. A Slight Edge.
I finally mustered the courage I could, turned off the car, went inside and gave what I am convinced to this day was the worst presentation in the history of sales. They did not buy a thing. In that sense, it was a total failure--but when I got back in my car, I was elated. I had blown the sales call, and achieved a victory in my life.
A few days later, I happened to be thinking about that article as I sat in my car, stopped in traffic. Just then, I saw why we were all stopped: a funeral procession went by. It took less than a minute because it contained only a few cars.
As traffic slowly started moving again, I thought, That person lived his or her entire life worrying about what other people thought...
And it suddenly hit me. Who has long funeral processions? At whose funerals do thousands cry? For whom do the millions mourn? For those who will do what others are not willing to do. For the people for whom we erect statues.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Lincoln.
Gigantic funerals are held and great crowds, sometimes entire nations, mourn for those people who spent their lives not worrying about what others thought.