Best 456 quotes in «mortality quotes» category

The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

The world shall retire from me before I shall retire from the world. John Quincy Adams

They are now informing me that not only are they better than the powerful, the masters of the world whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God orders them to honour those in authority) – not only are they better, but they have a “better time”, or at least will have a better time one day. But enough! enough! I can’t bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated – it seems to me just to stink of lies.

They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.

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.

They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.

Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made.

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 is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

This is what the scythedom was uncapable of understanding. They were so focused on the act of killing, they couldn't comprehend what went into the act of dying.

This last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.

This willing and even exuberant interfacing with one's own mortality has ancient roots. The Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome implored people to keep death in mind at all times, in order to appreciate life more and remain humble in the face of adversities. In various forms of Buddhism, the practice of meditation is often taught as a means of preparing oneself for death while still remaining alive. Dissolving one's ego into an expansive nothingness - achieving the enlightened state of nirvana - is seen as a trial run of letting oneself cross to the other side.

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its students." [Letter, November 1856]

Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath, From the blossom of health to the paleness of death, From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud- Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.

To accept a little death is worse than death itself.

Too high for common selfishness , he could At times resign his own for others' good, But not in pity - not because he ought, But in some strange perversity of thought, That swayed him onward with a secred pride To do what few or none could do beside; And this same impulse would, in tempting time, Mislead his spirit equally to crime; So much he soared beyond, or sank beneath, The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe And longed by good or ill to seperate Himself from all who shared his mortal fate.

To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know hot to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know hot to be dead.

To possess a wise heart, one that understands the fundamentally impenetrable calculus of mortality, we must face the fact that we are dying. That we will die. And the time to do this is long before death is imminent. Death’s reality shakes us awake like nothing else can, compelling us to seize the opportunities that arrive each day to live more intentionally and love more fully—not with a sense of panic but with a sense of sacred urgency. Not to obsess over our mortality, but to realize that while everything we do holds the potential for having an impact now, it also contains the promise of the only thing that can grant us anything close to immortality: our legacy.

Volume II: Chapter V What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I—I also am subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever.

We envy people who are extremely old because we wish to live that long, not because we want to be that old.

We are already dead but not yet in the ground. -Fear

We are, from a purely biological perspective, simply breathing pieces of defecating meat, no more significant or enduring than a lizard or a potato.

We are temporarily immortal, until we have fulfilled God's plans for our lives...then we become temporarily mortal, waiting to become permanently immortal at last

Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil; then are they borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what they dream they know is but the little each hath stumbled on in wandering about the world; yet boast they all that they have learned the whole—vain fools! for what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by mind of man. Thou, then, since thou hast fallen to this place, shalt know no more than human wisdom may attain.

We are not divine beings in mortal bodies. We are mortal bodies in pursuit of constructing divine perfection within us.

We do have funerals for the living," Jill said. "They're called birthday parties.

We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust.

We humans desperately seek stability in hopes, I think, that we can control our lives, though that isn't the way things work. Everything is in flux; we are dynamic beings born with expiration dates into an uncertain Universe.

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon. It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told. It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know. It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

We lose a significant portion of our lives attending ceremonies for people who have lost theirs.

We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

We never actively remember death,' Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.

We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, “the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” Though, presumably, they are a start.

We pass through this world like two gnats in a husk of millet on a boundless ocean! I grieve that life is but a moment in time, and envy the endless current of the Great River. Would that I might clasp to me some flying sprite and forever wander with him! Would that I might embrace the lightsome moon for all eternity!

We're all drowning, but don't say it out loud.

We reach the end of our lives long before we reach the end of ourselves.

We're truly alive when facing the prospect of our own mortality, if you convince yourself that you'll live forever, you'll never really have lived at all.

We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones: Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so you will be... Now death is un-cool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.

We were too greedy, grasping for immortality too soon. Perhaps if we had only been patient, content to wait, we would all have forever in the end.

We were immortal, did you know that? Did you feel it like me? We had the world at our feet and we were going to live forever. Then came life – growing inside you – and I became mortal.

We will lost everything that matters, or everything that matters will lose us. It is predestined, the nature of life.

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.

What good is immortality if nothing has been done to repair the fault lines in the human heart?

-what good for us this endless creating? / what is created - then annihilating? '& now IT'S PAST'!.. '" --Mephistopheles (Faust; Pt II)

What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

What indeed is the half-life of a mortal consciousness? What is the half-life of a memory of that mortal consciousness? Of course, this is purely an academic question and of no immediate concern to those of us existing in the world of the living, for we possess already a memory, in its stead, which serves as a basis of our perception of the past. Accurate or not, this nature of memory allows us to understand the past according to the positions occupied by the flesh about which we seek to know, but, unfortunately, not in a way relative to the flesh itself—that flesh stripped of identity and circumstance, that flesh which, in its most rudimentary capacity, had once collided, interacted, fought, competed, negotiated, cooperated, and mated with other flesh: there is no history of this kind, thoroughly naked and telling enough, which is accessible to us, for we are composed of the very same substance, the very same flesh, and sadly incapable of stepping outside of it, even momentarily.

What in hell was mortality? Shitting, pissing, eating, and then the same cycle all over again!