Quotes About Mortality

Suicide] is the essence of self-portraiture.

If Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.

No poem is ever written for its story line's sake only, just as no life is lived for the sake of an obituary. - Joseph Brodsky

You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave.

The secret cause of all suffering," he said, "is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.

You don't understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death.

shuffled off this mortal coil.

in this wonderful human brain of ours there has dawned a realization unknown to the other primates. It is that of the individual, conscious of himself as such, and aware that he, and all that he cares for, will one day die.

Minden szenvedés titkos oka - írta - maga a halandóság, amely egyúttal az élet elsÅ'dleges feltételét is alkotja. Ha igent akarunk mondani az èletre, akkor nem tagadhatjuk meg annak végességét sem.

When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

The mortal sickness of a mind too unhappy to be kind.

Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;Breath's a ware that will not keep.Up, lad: when the journey's overThere'll be time enough to sleep.

The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

See, the way I got it figured, dying is sort'a like the thing that gives your life meaning. You may not want to get there, but, without it, you're just looking at a long, long road to nowhere.

You're unlikely to find death anywhere near a tomb.  Everyone there is already dead. Death's business is among the living.

Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.

The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.

I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.

It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.

There's this to say of love and breath -- They give a man a taste for death.

Right you guessed the rising morrow And scorned to tread the mire you must: Dust's your wages, son of sorrow, But men may come to worse than dust. Souls undone, undoing others,- Long time since the tale began. You would not live to wrong your brothers: Oh lad, you died as fits a man.

Loveliest of Trees Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.

I see In many an eye that measures me The mortal sickness of a mind Too unhappy to be kind. Undone with misery, all they can Is to hate their fellow man; - from Poem XLI