Quotes About Mortality

If I am killed I can die but once. But to live in constant dread is to die over and over again.

The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty's limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one's control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.

Alles zerfällt im Augenblicke, wenn man nicht ein Dasein erschaffen hat, das über dem Sarge noch fortdauert. Um wen bei seinem Alter Söhne, Enkel und Urenkel stehen, der wird oft tausend Jahre alt.

Ya??yorlar. Ac? çekiyorlar. Ölüyorlar.

Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life.

more than 35 percent of all German men who were between the ages of 19 and 22 when the fighting broke out, for example, were killed in the next four and a half years, and many of the remainder grievously wounded. For France, the toll was proportionately even higher: one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at the war's outbreak were dead when it was over.

By 1917, a British fighter pilot arriving at the front had an average life expectancy of less than three months.

Cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man's life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted Nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth's barrier.

recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one's own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love;

For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life's central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.

We only have so much time, Mary," I remember saying. "Time will kill you – it really will.

Whatever language Death speaks is not ours; and most of us spend no time acquiring the complex grammar, in which every verb is irregular and only the past tense obtains, until it is too late

foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive. And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society.

But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood.

And just as in life, if a man imagines himself on his deathbed and then works back through the years of his life, he will make better decisions along the way, knowing the end. Or at the very least, hell spend his time more wisely.

Let whoever longs to attain eternal life in heaven heed these warnings: When considering the future, contemplate these things: Death, than which nothing is more certain

When you see an old lady who's on the wrong side of a good mood, now you know why. She has a past that you can't understand because you didn't live it. As she ages, her feet hurt, her back aches, her knees click, she cooks, she cleans, she worries, she waits, and then she gets sick and dies. Be kind, Anina. Someday you'll be the old lady.

Bethink thee of the adage, 'Call none blest, till peaceful death have crowned a life of weal.

He has opened the way of wisdom to mortals, by proclaiming as a sovereign law: By suffering comes understanding

What mortal else who hears shall claim he was born immune to the demon of harm?

Even so is the Libyan fable famed abroad: the eagle, pierced by the bow-sped shaft, looked at the feathered device, and said, "Thus, not by others, but by means of our own plumage, are we slain.

In the good days remember also death.

Da bi vidjeli smrt neprijatelja, neki su spremni vidjeti i vlastitu.

And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all -- we shake our fists at the big, beautiful, indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.