Best 456 quotes in «mortality quotes» category

Mortality is but a stepping-stone to a more glorious existence in the future.

Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair.

Our life's a moment and less than a moment, but even this mite nature has mockingly humored with some appearance of a longer span.

Reaching 50, I've started to conjure up thoughts of my own mortality.

Sister, look ye, How, by a new creation of my tailor's I've shook off old mortality.

Religion does not belong to God; it belongs to the human reaction against mortality!

Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman.

The reason some men fear older women is they fear their own mortality.

That flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust.

The infant mortality rates are insanely high. The obesity epidemic is on the rise. It is all related.

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.

There is nothing serious in Mortality

There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow claspest the limits of mortality.

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Who has that absolute trust, to fling yourself into mortality, to let it do with you as it will, with all the permutations and possibilities of as it will, be it horror or ecstasy or boredom?

We only really, deeply consider what our life is when we're faced with mortality on some level.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.

We really feel the fact of our mortality after we turn forty years old.

We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.

Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.

Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal, I would never fight on the front lines again or command you in the field where men win fame. But now, as it is, the fates of death await us, thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive can flee them or escape – so in we go for attack! Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!

Accepting one's age and mortality is a sign that you've now become an adult. Once you realize you no longer fit in the same jeans you did when you were 30, and the spicy foods you loved when you were younger now like to revisit you at 2 AM, you come to realize that with aging comes adjustment. And, aging isn't a bad thing - it sure beats the alternative!

A death may be a death, or early warning of existential threat or out-of-context problem. Nothing occurs in isolation. The world’s doom ripples back and forth through time.

A heroic, losing battle! I'm tired of brave men who die. There's nothing pretty about losing.

All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation.

All who live possess eternal life, and few would trade it for an immortal body, if they truly understood what it is to be alive.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.

All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story.

...A mirror can trick you day by day into thinking you remain looking and existing in one way forever. But a photograph presents you with the truth: it freezes you eternally, existing as a reminder that you can never, ever go back to any one moment again- that you are always changing, hour by hour, cell by cell, in tiny fragments that build skyscrapers overnight.

Americans in 1763 lived always in the shadow and presence of death. Death was not yet romanticized as it would be in the 19th century, nor yet sanitized as it would be in the 20th century.

And in those moments when the two of them are playing dead, I quietly climb back upstairs because, as time passes and as I spot my parents doing young, lighthearted things, I'm overrun by some cruel and preoccupying sense that I'm watching the memory of them.

An awareness of mortality is a heavy price to pay for sentience

And in a way, this was how he had come to see his death, as a series of small ones taking place over the course of his life and leading finally to the main event, which would be so anti-climatic, so undramatic (a sudden violent seizure in his long abused heart, a quick massive flooding of the brain) it would go unnoticed. It was the small deaths occurring over an entire lifetime that took the greater toll.

Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.

And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.

...and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.

And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.

And so it was literature that brought me back to life.

And we went through AIDS... which was as good a course in mortality as anyone is likely to get, short of war.

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal.

A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.

Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.

A premature death does not only rob one of the countless instances where one would have experienced pleasure, it also saves one from the innumerable instances where one would have experienced pain.