Quotes About Finitude

Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.

As people become aware of the finitude of their life, they do not ask for much. They do not seek more riches. They do not seek more power. They ask only to be permitted, insofar as possible, to keep shaping the story of their life in the world—to make choices and sustain connections to others according to their own priorities.

As people become aware of the finitude of their life, they do not ask for much. They do not seek more riches. They do not seek more power. They ask only to be permitted, insofar as possible, to keep shaping the story of their life in this world-- to make choices and sustain connections to others according to their own priorities. In modern society, we have come to assume that debility and dependence rule out such autonomy.

The terror of sickness and old age is not merely the terror of the losses one is forced to endure but also the terror of the isolation. As people become aware of the finitude of their life, they do not ask for much. They do not seek more riches. They do not seek more power. They ask only to be permitted, insofar as possible, to keep shaping the story of their life in the world—to make choices and sustain connections to others according to their own priorities.

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

The body I have and am is my most intimate point of entry into the world. It serves me, at times it sustains my flagging spirity with its vitality, at other times it reminds me of my finitude with its limitations.

Toda grandeza acaba: las montañas se desmoronan, y hechas polvo, van al fondo del mar; los imperios se derriban, y hechos pedazos van al fondo de la historia; las glorias se apagan, y apenas dejan chispas en las lejanías de lo pasado; el sol se apagará también, todo es cuestión de tiempo, y no dejará más que una osamenta fría rodando por el espacio.

Either it is the fold of the infinite, or the constant folds [replis] of finitude which curve the outside and constitute the inside.

We have always been going back, since birth, back toward not being alive.

A los mortales os hace falta compañía porque tenéis tristeza, deseos y un tiempo limitado de vida.

Time: her heart wretched. What a useless thing, her mind growled. Only humans would be so arrogant and so stupid as to count down their own deaths.

It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).

We must die without much delay, and corpses may not require such expansive wrappings, in order to go the way of all flesh.

T]he devastating possibility that "wasting time" and "passing time" amount to the same thing.

I tell myself to hurry up, that I have to do everything before death catches me.

I am dust and my story ends here.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.

The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one.

All the labours of ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinciton in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.

Watching the developments from afar was both an exercise of academic speculation and resignation to the finitude of one's capabilities; an opportunity to tend to one's neuroses in the privacy of one's secret garden; an acquiescence to impotence and an acknowledgement of the limits of the pen.

He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition.

We hang between two seemingly irreconcilable facts / the capacity to Sing and the inevitability of Death.

We all know we're one day closer to the end when we wake up in the morning. We just kid ourselves that it's not happening.