Best 456 quotes in «mortality quotes» category

But, when our immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror -- that horrible, depressing anxiety -- creeps back into our mind. Trauma can cause this, as can shame and social ridicule. As can, as Becker points out, mental illness.

Can you no longer see a road to freedom? It's right in front of you. You need only turn over your wrists.

Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. ... He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what is means to be alive.

Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you. Have you given much thought to our mortal condition? Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen. All mortals owe a debt to death. There's no one alive who can say if he will be tomorrow. Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery. No one can teach it, no one can grasp it. Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink! But don't forget Aphrodite--that's one sweet goddess. You can let the rest go. Am I making sense? I think so. How about a drink. Put on a garland. I'm sure the happy splash of wine will cure your mood. We're all mortal you know. Think mortal. Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life, it's just catastrophe.

Creating art allows us to beat the odds and find immortality, without having to do the whole Doctor Faustus thing. Though Brian Wilson and Mike Love no longer collaborate and Carl and Dennis Wilson are gone, they are all still together on the radio late at night, where they join voices and are young and golden and beautiful forever.

Creating is the closest thing to being immortal.

Daja was a Trader: they held it was mad to argue when the sick thought that Death approached. Denials only told Death here was someone who would be missed, Death's favourite kind of victim.

Death is a monster that chases the rapt spectator from the theater before the play he is watching with infinite interest has ended.

Dear Miss Pomeroy, I am saddened by the things I do not know. There are hundreds--thousands--of books in the world and I will never be able to read all of them. I am old. Walter

Death, death, death attends us every second. Our lives are passed in the presence of death. While working individually for your future, you well know that the future will give you nothing but death. And death will destroy all you worked for. Thus, it is clear that life for oneself can never have any meaning. If there is a rational life, it must be some other kind of life; it must be one, the purpose of which does not consist in securing one’s own future. To live rationally, we must live so that death cannot destroy our life.

Death, in the human perspective, is not a given, it must be achieved. It is a task, one which we take up actively, one which becomes the source of our activity and mastery. Man dies, that is nothing. But man is, starting from his death. He ties himself tight to his death with a tie of which he is the judge. He makes his death; he makes himself mortal and in this way gives himself the power of a maker and gives to what he makes its meaning and its truth. The decision to be without being is possibility itself: the possibility of death.

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

Death is every mortal’s life to be alive!

Death is number one on the list of things that we wish were possible to leave behind when we escaped barbarism.

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.

Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.

Dès que Séraphine l'a laissé seul, Gontran se jette à genoux au pied du lit ; il enfonce son front dans les draps, mais ne parvient pas à pleurer ; aucun élan ne soulève son cœur. Ses yeux désespérément restent secs. Alors il se relève. Il regarde ce visage impassible. Il voudrait, en ce moment solennel, éprouver je ne sais quoi de sublime et de rare, écouter une communication de l'au-delà, lancer sa pensée dans des régions éthérées,suprasensibles - mais elle reste accrochée, sa pensée, au ras du sol. Il regarde les mains exsangues du mort, et se demande combien de temps encore les ongles continueront de pousser.

DEATH Why do you fear me? I am your friend. I but guide trav'lers Rounding the bend --- Lead them to freedom From time and age, Help them start writing a new page... Seek for me never, Keep your course true --- When I am needed I'll come to you, Then I will show you Roads without end --- Why do you fear me? I am your friend.

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...?

Each of us repeats Adam’s journey and acknowledges, with the loss of innocence, that he is mortal. Weep and pray, O Arseny. And do not fear death, for death is not just the bitterness of parting. It is also the joy of liberation.” (Laurus, p. 30)

Do you know what mortal means? It means born to die. It means deserving of death. That’s what you are, what defines you—dying.

Each October I walk into the woods looking for bones: rabbit skulls, a grackle spine, the pelvis of a deer with the blood bleached out. What died in the lush of roses and mint shines out from the tangle of twigs that bind it to the place of its last leaping. The living lack that kind of clarity. In late April, when the water spreads out and out till everything is lilies and seepage, there is only the mystery of tracks, a rustle receding in the many reeds. And so the bones accumulate across my windowsill: the flightless wings and exaggerated grins, the silent unmoving reminders of where the glories of April lead.

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 am asking is, have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind but with your body? Actually felt that one the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be icy and yellow? No, of course you don't believe it. Which is the reason why up until now you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement.

Each cell within its atom is a raw, formless idea that exists beyond mortality. It is the wild state constantly creating your world, the one word in a collective equation that is you becoming written from nothing into something — and so it knows, ultimately, annihilation is an essential instrument of becoming new to all that can be known.

Dying sun, shine warm a little longer! - Lament for Pasiphaë

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.

Even fear faded, incipient mortality giving way to the kind of drawn-out academic detachment that rendered “certain death” as “incipient mortality.

Even they have died who said death is an illusion.

Every moment of the day there should be someone shouting from the rooftops, "Life, enjoy it while you can.

Every second is a step away from our mothers’ wombs towards our own tombs.

Everything is new and doomed.

Every time a believer mounts from this earth to paradise, it is an answer to Christ's prayer. A good old divine remarks, "Many times Jesus and His people pull against one another in prayer. You bend your knee in prayer and say 'Father, I will that Thy saints be with me where I am'; Christ says, 'Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am.

Fear and hopelessness washed over her. She was looking her own mortality in the face, and it was a horrifying thing to do.

For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on.

Even if their supplies of love are finite, they've figured out that life is, too, and they're no longer rationing.

Every leaf before it falls must think itself immortal.

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.

Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, Prometheus had told me, the story they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.

For, though seven years be a mere breath in the memories of the old, it is a long transfiguration to him whose first youth is passing, and who finds unsolicited additions accruing to some parts of his being and strange deprivations in others, and upon whom the unhappy realization begins to be borne in, that his is no particular case, and that he of all the world is not to be spared, but, like his forbears, must inevitably wriggle in the disguising crucible of time. And, though men accept it with apparently patient humor, the first realization that people do grow old, and that they do it before they have had time to be young, is apt to come like a shock.

Having always observed that most of them who constantly took in the weekly Bills of Mortality made little other use of them than to look at the foot how the burials increased or decreased, and among the Casualties what had happened, rare and extraordinary, in the week current; so as they might take the same as a Text to talk upon in the next company, and withal in the Plague-time, how the Sickness increased or decreased, that the Rich might judge of the necessity of their removal, and Trades-men might conjecture what doings they were likely to have in their respective dealings.

Getting older seems to but does not make us even more mortal.

Golden lads and girls all must, like chimmney-sweepers, come to dust.

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.

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.

He'd learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time.

He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.

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.

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.

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...