Quotes About Mortality

If one man lives as though he would never die and another man lives as though he might die tomorrow, would either one wear a wristwatch?

The key to staying unintimidated is to convince yourself that the person you're facing is a mere mortal, no different from you-- which is in fact the truth. See the person, not the myth. Imagine him or her as a child, as someone riddled with insecurities. Cutting the other person down to size will help your keep your mental balance.

Life has more meaning in the face of Death.

As a warrior in life, you must turn this dynamic around: make the thought of death something not to escape but to embrace. Your days are numbered. Will you pass them half awake and halfhearted or will you live with a sense of urgency?

the vague thought passed through my mind that all of us, probably, would die like that: unexpectedly, in the middle of something we wanted to do, instead of at the end of our endeavors, as we always fondly believe.

Someone would cut his name into the face of a tombstone and it would be as if he never was.

I'm writing this book because we're all going to die.

After four hundred and ninety-nine years of existence, Connor Buchanan arrived at an inescapable conclusion regarding himself. He was a coldhearted old bastard.

I doona want to be loved because I'm Undead. No more than ye would want to be rejected for being mortal.

Not that he truly wished them dead--that wasn't quite it--but more and more often, when the man considered his lifelong friends, his colleagues, even his wife and sons, he felt that their image of him had become so mildewed by habit or complicated by misunderstanding that he took comfort in the idea of their mortality: the thought that soon, very soon, they would die and he would no longer have to be the person they had concluded he was.

When you kill a man, You steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, Rob his children of a father.

Thinking of the anguish of his final days and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I want to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you're going to sleep, the ones you've already forgotten by the time you wake up.

He had a frozen, wide-eyed look to his face, I remember, the way some old people do, like they are perpetually startled by the monstrous surprise that is old age.

Thinking of him, of the anguish of his final days, and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I wanted to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you're going to sleep, the ones you've already forgotten by the time you wake up.

Dying can be quite the career move for a young poet.

An Afghan who is afraid of dying is an Afghan who is already dead.

It Does not Frighten Me To Leave This Life That My Only Son Left Five Years Ago, This Life That Insist We Bear Sorrow Upon Sorrow Long After We Can Bear No More. No I Believe I Shall Gladly Take My Leave When The Time Comes. What Frightens Me Is The Day God Summon Me Before Him And Asks. How Shall I Explain Myself To Him. What Will Be My Defense For Not Heeding His Commads.

For the remainder of her days, my grandmother lay in bed, staring past the window into space. It was if a part of her mind had died before her body had time to give up.

But I knew Nick. He was too ugly to die.

Sunt qui discessum animi a corpore putent esse mortem. Sunt erras

Death is the general condition. Life is the exception: a beautiful, love-filled exception.

as if you are already dead.'" "What's that?" "A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead.

It was so hard to imagine that a mind could be gone. All those thoughts that you never tell anyone, all those dreams, all that entire pocket universe: gone. A character unlike any other character, a consciousness. It didn't seem possible.

Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you're going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children's chances with you. That you'd left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.