Quotes About Mortals

We don't become mature human beings by getting lucky or cleverly circumventing loss, and certainly not by avoidance and distraction. Learn to lament. Learn this lamentation. We're mortals, after all. We and everyone around are scheduled for death (mortis). Get used to it. Take up your cross. It prepares us and those around us for resurrection. — Eugene Peterson

But if religion is more than the attainment of power and privilege, if it is the doorway into beauty and mystery and meaning, then not only is divinity unnecessary but it is an impediment, for it implies that enlightenment is beyond the reach of mortals.

Hope, which most of all guides the changeful mind of mortals.

Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods (from Hephaistos's forge itself, as it happens) to make the lives of mortals better, so with a masterful bit of prototypical game-theory, Zeus set up a scenario that would, metaphorically, blow up in everybody's faces and make life that much worse.

Because culture as such can have no temporal limits, a culture understands its past not as destiny, but as history, that is, as a narrative that has begun but points always toward the endlessly open. Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries.

Zeus, first cause, prime mover; for what thing without Zeus is done among mortals?

My dear lady, in my experience of ill-doing, Providence leaves the work of conviction and chastisement to us mortals—and the process is often fraught with difficulties. There are no short cuts.

Providence leaves the work of conviction and chastisement to us mortals - and the process is often fraught with difficulties, There are short cuts.

Providence leaves the work of conviction and chastisement to us mortals—and the process is often fraught with difficulties. There are no short cuts.

In Rome, they stared for hours at the magnificent Apollo and Daphne. Minna described the piece in a letter to a friend. "The Greeks construed Apollo's loss of Daphne," she wrote, "as symbolizing that all mortals shall be denied the Heart's Desire, ever the unattainable.

I refuse to believe that gods want to make mortals unhappy and torment them. That's what humans do. And humans are very definitely not divine.

'Tis better to be known as a good man than a great one, for greatness is an assessment of mortals; goodness a gift of God.

Laws, however divine in origin and institution, would be found of little coercion among men, were the administration of them not committed to mortals.

Of themselves diseases come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently; for wise Zeus took away speech from them. So is there no way to escape the will of Zeus

The greatness that would make us grave, Is but an empty thing. What more than mirth would mortals have? The cheerful man's a king.

Nature has a surer plan than mortals can devise.

Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.

Prometheus: Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing their doom. Chorus: What cure did you discover for that sickness? Prometheus: I sowed in them blind hopes.

Eternity is the divine treasure-house, and hope is the window, by means of which mortals are permitted to see, as through a glass darkly, the things which God is preparing.

To be fortunate is God, and more than God to mortals.

Conscience is a God to all mortals.

Parents are flawed human beings who are given a role that more approximates that of God than of mere mortals.

Such is hope, heaven's own gift to struggling mortals, pervading, like some subtle essence from the skies, all things both good and bad.

Hope lies to mortals And most believe her, But man's deceiver Was never mine.