Quotes About Mortality

Yet the war and all that the war contained—nobility, villainy, immeasurable sorrow—is certain to live on even after the last old soldier has gone to his grave. May the earth lie lightly on his bones.

There is something within our biological structure that screams out and says it is morally wrong for the old to outlive the young. This is one of the times when God doesn't seem to make sense. This is the worst that life gets.

Yet how lovely, to think that a person can live forever as long as one last bird sings in the dying light of one more day.

He liked the cemetery. He told me once that it was where a man his age had to go to talk to anybody who could appreciate him.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

Death was terribly durable. It was the sturdiest idea around. A body was dead, and before long it wasn't even a body anymore, it was just elements. But it was still dead.

I'd love to tell you I had some deep revelation on my way down, that I came to terms with my own mortality, laughed in the face of death, et cetera. The truth? My only thought was: Aaaaggghhhhh!

Well, I think life is precious because you can't watch it again. I mean you can believe in an after life if that makes you feel better but once you realize you're not going to be around forever, I think that's what makes life so magical.

It always comes back to us - why are we here? Well, we just happened to be here, we couldn't choose it. The chance of us being born - that sperm hitting that egg - is 400 trillion to 1. We're not special, we're just lucky; and this is a holiday. We didn't exist for 14 and a half billion years. Then we get 80 or 90 years if we're lucky, and then we'll never exist again. So we should make the most of it.

Here lies Ricky Gervais: He had a laugh then found a lump.

If you're afraid to die, you're afraid to live. You can't have one without the other.

Every human being on earth has two things in common. Death and a broken heart.

I could die. That was obviously an option all along—and I knew it—but in that moment, in that gloomy room, for some unknown reason … it finally sunk in. Like, really sunk in. And it sunk in hard. I felt the floor tip under me. I don't mean that in a fancy-pants, writing way. I mean it felt like the floor actually tipped under my feet—severely—and then dropped away.

I hate when people question my ability to get from one place to another without mutilating myself. It's tantamount to saying, "Try to get home without screwing it up like last time, dummy," or "Farewell, for I may never see you again, given the mortality that awaits us all like a crouching panther.

People--stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.

Alone: it was no way to live and it was no way to die.

Time is the best teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all of its students.

You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the grim reaper.

Because beyond ensuring that a body has a name, dignity is one of the only things you can actually offer the dead.

It seems to me that he died from a combination of two of the oldest and most insidious killers of all: ignorance and avarice.

Though it may not be a suitable comment for even this confidential record, I thought, by no means for the first time in such surroundings, what an odd way it was for people of opposite sexes to spend the evening, when, after all, there was nothing ahead that any of us could be sure of but infirmity, illness, and death.

You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.

The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.

I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry.