Quotes About Finitude

Mortality defines the human condition.

We are mortals, we will die one day.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

Wisdom lies in voluntary finitude and a timely change of heart: until maturity, multiplying the inclusions, up to the limit of natural faculty and moral harmony; afterwards, gladly relinquishing zone after zone of vegetation, and letting the snow-peak of integrity rise to what height it may.

Men sometimes die much earlier than they are burried.

163. Prisoners We are all prisoners. But we sit on the keys. Finitude is our cell. The universe is our prison. Our jail keeper is the Act of Being. The keys to liberation are clenched tightly in the fists of our own egos.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

If it weren't for death, life would be unbearable.

I am going to die. When I die I will be dead, gone, no more. There will be no more thinking, no more breathing, no more feeling of any kind. There will blackness and the blackness will be eternal. There will be silence and the silence will last forever. I am going to die.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

Il faut abandonner l'illusion qu'elle [la philosophie] pourrait retenir l'essence dans la finitude de ses déterminations.

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

Whether or not you can imagine your own death, it seems quite natural to be at least a bit afraid of not existing.

Un día estás vivo y arrastrándote por el mundo, y al siguiente te has convertido en un frío fertilizante, en bufé para gusanos. Este es el asombroso milagro de la muerte.

neither being accustomed to his new fleshiness and insistence to sleep on one side only, so as not to hear his heart: he had made the mistake one night in 1920 of calculating the maximal number of its remaining beats (allowing for another half-century), and now the preposterous hurry of the countdown irritated him and increased the rate at which he could hear himself dying.

I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

Tineretea are un sfârsit: sfârÈ™itul e aici. Nu va mai fi niciodat?. O È™tii prea bine. ?i atunci? Scrie-o, blestematule, scrie-o! La ce altceva eÈ™ti bun?

I will endure until the stars wink out & the very last trace of heat ebbs from the cosmos & there is nothing but eternal icy nothingness

So, let me get this right...the big whoop about being human is that you get to die?

A universe that came from nothing in the big bang will disappear into nothing at the big crunch. Its glorious few zillion years of existence not even a memory.

of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

And we will persist in chasing the impossible until we are no more.

Idols evoke worship in us because we think they can save us from life's contingencies, mysteries, and finitude. Put another way, we make idols of all sorts of things—the stock market, a job, superstar athletes and performers, our families—because we think that by giving our allegiance to them we will make our lives secure and complete.

When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too.