Quotes about mortality

Mortal minds are always unsettled by eternal things they want to catch the infinite and nail it down to something finite. Impossible!

I sometimes think that never blows so redThe Rose as where some buried Caesar bledThat every Hyacinth the Garden wearsDropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.

We have hands we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.

To Suspect your Own Mortality is to Know the Beginning of Terror To Learn Irrefutably that you are mortal is to Know the End of Terror.

Strangest problems of life seem clearing but clouds sweep between--Is my journey’s end coming?

I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon

All flesh shall perish together and man shall turn again unto dust.

Oh why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a fast-flitting meteor a fast-flying cloud A flash of the lightning a break of the wave He passes from life to his rest in the grave.

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of scienc

Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.

I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, "We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.

Ere the horne'd owl hoot Once and twice and thrice there shall Go among the blind brown worms News of thy great burial; When the pomp is passed away, 'Here's a King,' the worms shall say.

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of o

I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric productAnd look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.

The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth

Hawks with broken wings; lions with broken paws; men with broken hearts, they all have one thing in common: they're all as sure to die as those unbroken.

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

Your life is a sum of counted breaths.With each breath that passesa part of life is lost. That which gives life brings death every moment nearer,and your caravan is led by onewho will not jest with you.

Even if it's being a Beatle for the rest of my life, it's still only a temporary thing.

The to-read pile is more than just a physical stack of books: it's a tower of ambitions failed, hopes unrealised, good intentions unfulfilled. Worse still, it's a cold hard reminder of mortality. Already, I have intentions to read more books than I can hope to manage in a normal lifetime. How will this pile of books taunt me when I'm 64?

It's good to remember…So you know you need to do now,So you know that you ain't got forever just right now,Good to remember death man.

Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; "The night cometh.

Wolf Winter,’ she said, her voice small. ‘I wanted to ask about it. You know, what it is.’He was silent for a long time. ‘It's the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal,’ he said. ‘Mortal and alone.

It isn't about being fair and equal. It's about the difference between right and wrong." He stared out at the bloody Elinarch. "And this was wrong.

Be Mindful of Death" (Memento Mori)

I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the warm biological noises of the night, but my being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time.If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! Crush the infernal machine! Shatter its bland face and rip those cursed hands from their torturous axis of circumscription! I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling beneath my hands, the glass fracturing, the case cracking

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?" "I do," Dunbar told him. "Why?" Clevinger asked. "What else is there?

Bugle"Black beetles know where the most recent bonesbake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine --drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone--they will lead you to a barren gulchsurrounded by sages and nettles, dirtburnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunchabove the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare locust tree a telling reliquary of dust to dust, all so brutally

But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

There are some fights none of us can win.

he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.

And we went through AIDS... which was as good a course in mortality as anyone is likely to get, short of war.

Can you hear me? Sighing. You were right. My requiem is well prepared. Still to be written is the poem that is never complete, an endless rubbing on the ink block, an endless dipping of the pen, an endless swoop over the white paper, the poem of my life. I will try to write it down. Soon, no, now, I will try. The first line. I called him Necktie. I will write: He taught me to see with eyes of feeling.

If you don't make peace with your own mortality, you'll never know what it's like to truly be alive.

Your faces are very beautiful,but they are wooden cages.You had better run from me.My words are fire.

The vast and terrible depth."“Of course,” he said.“The inexhaustibility.”“I understand.”“The whole huge nameless thing.”“Yes, absolutely.”“The massive darkness.”“Certainly, certainly.”“The whole terrible endless hugeness.”“I know exactly what you mean.

I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I'd just about worn it out, but it was worn out with love, and that's the best kind of worn-out there is. Maybe we're like all those used cars, broken hand tools, articles of old clothing, scratched record albums, and dog-eared books. Maybe there really isn't any such thing as mortality; that life simply wears us out with love.

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in a large house refrains from looking into mirrors, and instead busies herself with trivial errands, so that she may catch no glimpse of the thing whose feet she hears at times on the stairs.

She's thirty-four years old. In fifty, sixty years, she'll be dead, and everything reminds her of this fact but him. With Arnie, she imagines she might live forever.

I should like to ask you:-Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother's knee, seem days of very long ago?"Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:"Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by my many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty yo

[T]he habit of living as if in the shadow of death has remained with me, and I consider that, too, a gift.

You will not be here--I shall not be here--much lo

Ignorance of mortality is a comfort.

The most optimistic part of life is its mortality… God is a real genius.

I do not understand how you know you only have one life if you have never died, because if you have never died, then you cannot possibly know if you would go on living a second life, or go on living no more lives.

The seeds of life - fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that's born for death. That is the source of all men's fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heaven's light, shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep.

The things that frighten us most are those that remind us of our fragile existence

Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we’d slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don’t. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk as if it might all go on forever.

I don't think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.

You will always be special to someone. Unless you grow so old, everyone you knew went ahead

Without time, you have only the bottomless, shapeless mire of eternity....Time is what gives life significance.

In my mind, I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in.

Your death rides a fast camel.

Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.

Malady of mortality

The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.

Over the years, I have developed a visceral reaction to families and victims expressing surprise at tragedy. Why are we surprised? Why do we forget we are mortal? Bad, bad things happen everywhere, every day. Humans, for better or worse, harbor this feeling that we - individually - are special. A patch of ice or a pea-sized blood clot makes a mockery of that illusion in a heartbeat. We are not special at all.

In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

Maybe I'll have a tumour like his someday. At first it will be a small but growing sphere that will branch out, growing larger in my stomach like a fetus. I will probably feel it when it starts to take motion, moving inward with the fury of a sleepwalking child, traveling through my intestines blindly -

You're mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.

Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.

How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?

Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo... No, that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believe it completely, believe not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy...?

Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace. Just as it was started on its first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere will it delay.

I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as

We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What's the trouble?

I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.

Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.

Morbidity and Mortality RoundsForgive me, body before me, for this.Forgive me for my bumbling hands, unschooledin how to touch: I meant to understandwhat fever was, not love. Forgive me formy stare, but when I look at you, I seemyself laid bare. Forgive me, body, forwhat seems like calculation when I takea breath before I cut you with my knife,because the cancer has to be removed.Forgive me for not telling you, but I’mno poet. Please forgive me, please. Forgivemy gloves, my callous greeting, my

He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.

The end is never worth the beginning.

I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.

It is the way of mortals. They fling themselves at life and emerge broken.

We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

The great art of life is to moderate our passions. Objects of affection are like other belongings. We must love them enough to enrich our lives while we have them, not enough to impoverish our lives when they are gone.

It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and on one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply morta

Mortality is one of the greatest gifts ever bestowed. After a long and fruitful life, we are able to rest.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

An Arundel TombSide by side, their faces blurred,The earl and countess lie in stone,Their proper habits vaguely shownAs jointed armour, stiffened pleat,And that faint hint of the absurd -The little dogs under their feet.Such plainness of the pre-BaroqueHardly involves the eye, untilIt meets his left-hand gauntlett, stillClasped empty in the other, andOne sees with a sharp tender shockHis hand withdrawn, holding her hand.They would not think to lie so long,Such faithfulness in effigyWas just a de

Think not, O Mortal, vainly gay.That Thou from Human Woes is free,The bitter cup I drink today,Tomorrow may be drunk by thee.

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

Your only real problem is mortality! No religion can solve this problem, but science can do!

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,like winter, which even now is passing.For beneath the winter is a winter so endlessthat to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.Climb praising as you return to connection.Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.The emptiness inside you allows you to vibratein full res

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

A small fact:You are going to die....does this worry you?

Life is only precious because it ends, kid.

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

There is not love of life without despair about life.

On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!

Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.

Death, only death, can break the lasting chain;And here, ev'n then, shall my cold dust remain