Best 456 quotes in «mortality quotes» category

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

The music is happy; the laughter is happy. Everything feels ecstatic and desperate. Blurrily, I think of sex, and I think of death. I realize: Every moment of joyous celebration contains the seed of death.

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time. I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.

The perfection of created life and the absolute beauty of nature is tarnished only by mortality and the cruel evils perpetrated by human kind. If humanity is the plague- only the divine is the cure...

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.

There are a few things I've learned over the years. One is that time doesn't stop for anyone; hurdling forward and onward, unstoppable and catastrophic.

The real reason the number of things that are shared via social media every single minute is so astronomical is because, whenever they each do, most users do not share or say something because they believe they have something worth remembering; they do mainly or only because they fear being forgotten.

There are many cells in your body that are dying as you read these words. Fifty to seventy billion cells die each day in the average human adult. You are too busy to organise funerals for all of them! At the very same time, new cells are being born, and you don't have the time to sing Happy Birthday to them. If old cells don't die, there's no chance for new cells to be born. So death is a very good thing. It's very crucial for birth. You are undergoing birth and death in this very moment.

There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.

There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.

There are some fights none of us can win.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

The roads were in a state of total turmoil on our way back. The gruesome scenes in the ditches - the dead lying where they had been thrown off the highway to make way for the traffic - should have disturbed us much more than they did. My personal lack of reaction on seeing men, women and, worst of all, children lying in a variety of death poses, like bundles of discarded clothing, surprised me very much indeed. I can only think that this was a subconscious protection of my sanity - that as long as we had no physical contact with the horrors we faced, we could not be adversely affected by them. The fact that all these people had proved to be mortal seemed only to enhance our own feeling of immortality.

There is only one true wealth in all the universe--living time.

There is one question George is asked about life and art and which is more important, and George said art is more important because it is immortal. This struck a very deep note inside me. For I am quite aware of the chance that I have or will have AIDS. The odds are very great and, in fact, the symptoms already exist. My friends are dropping like flies and I know in my heart that it is only divine intervention that has kept me alive this long. I don’t know if I have five months or five years, but I know my days are numbered. This is why my activities and projects are so important now. To do as much as possible as quickly as possible. I’m sure that what will live on after I die is important enough to make sacrifices of my personal luxury and leisure time. Work is all I have and art is more important than life.

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

The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn't, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.

The song is an unvarnished love shout, an implorement tinged with...anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosoher, the anger of a pot. An anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away, that we're being shown marvels but reminded always that they don't belong to us. They're sultans' treasures; we're lucky, we're expected to feel lucky to have been invited to see them at all.

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 Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong.

The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra.

The Sunday morning choir raised their voices to fever pitch with another gospel tune. Slurring voices filled with thick drawls of the local accent. The choir a mix of young girls her own age, alongside elderly women, with a few men thrown in for good measure. The old ladies wore tight gray buns and librarian glasses. Could they have ever been young? Could their husbands have?

the unconscious is so seductive because mortality is alien to it

The syllogism he had learnt from Kieswetter's logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is more", had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applies to himself. That Caius -- man in the abstract -- was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya with a mama and papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with toys, a coachman, and a nurse, and later with Katenka – Vanya, with all the joys, sorrows, and enthusiasms of his childhood, boyhood, and youth. Had Caius ever kissed his mother’s hand so dearly, and had the silk folds of her dress ever rustled so for him? Had Caius ever rioted at school when the pastries were bad? Had he ever been so much in love? Or presided so well over a court session?

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

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?

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.

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]

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.