Best 456 quotes in «mortality quotes» category

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 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 sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth

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

The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years, while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.

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 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 unconscious is so seductive because mortality is alien to it

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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?

To accept a little death is worse than death itself.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

We have presumed based not on our own but on others’ deaths that we are mortal.

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 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 only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

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!