Best 456 quotes in «mortality quotes» category

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 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 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 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!

What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships--especially your your relationships.

What is life but an attempt to let our immortal self defeat our mortality?

Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.

When people pass away, we hurt, and we miss them. It's consoling to know they're not feeling anything. They're void of any consciousness. They're at peace.

When life ends it's like a book losing pages or a song skipping. It's abrupt and it doesn't make sense.

When mortality is the equation, we are but pawns in a game.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

When the Root and Branch were young, when the Rose still grew unplucked upon the tree; when all our lands were new and green and we danced without care, then, we were immortal... We left those lands for the world where time dwells, dancing, that we might see the passage of the sun and the growing of the world. Here we may die, and where we can fall, and here King ___ has stopped his dancing.

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.

Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?" "Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

Yes, it will all end one day; but today is worth living.

With regard to things such as independence, mental capabilities, and sexuality, a very old man is nothing but a gigantic infant with white hair and wrinkles.

Wouldn’t the joys of life lose all colour, if life was eternal?

Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.

You can't taste the glory of that person, Who pass the the gate of mortality , Which is guarded by stupidity

Your real name is a mortal name. Now you need one that is immortal, the one that takes the high stage and plays above the rest. You can't be immortal and mortal at the same time.

You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals

You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.

You need to be greedy or ignorant to truly want to live forever.

Your death rides a fast camel.

You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

You know, it’s really very peculiar. 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 how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead.

You will not be here--I shall not be here--much longer.' 'Let us not think of time.' 'We have reached Faust's non-plus. We say to every moment "Verweile doch, du bist so sch&oumln," and if we are not immediately damned, the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike. But it is open to us to regret each minute as it passes.' 'We shall be exhausted.' 'And is not that a good state to end in?

You will die, and I, and all we can create—why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.

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

A glass of good wine is a gracious creature, and reconciles poor mortality to itself and that is what few things can do.

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.

Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.

Anything that has to deal with our mortality is always going to be interesting to us. Life and death is always going to be something that draws our attention.

As we go through life our relationship with our own mortality and our inevitable demise increases.

Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:-- We are as they; Like them we fade away As doth a leaf.

For me, Charles Xavier is a monk. He's like a selfless, egoless almost sexless force for the betterment of humanity and mortality.

Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!

God is a placebo for your own mortality.

I'd love to tell you I had some deep revelation on my way down, that I came to terms with my own mortality, laughed in the face of death, et cetera. The truth? My only thought was: Aaaaggghhhhh!

I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.