Quotes About Mortality

Omul tân?r tinde cu toat? f?ptura spre zenitul vieÈ›ii.Drumul duce înc? în sus.Când ajunge pe culme È™i o porneÈ™ti pe drumul care duce în jos È™i z?reÈ™ti valea cufundat? în umbrele înser?rii, gândul morÈ›ii îÈ›i devine mai familiar.

I nod and wonder what to say to encourage him. His lips have fallen away, his mouth has become larger, his teeth stick out and look as though they were made of chalk. The flesh melts, the forehead bulges more prominently, the cheekbones protrude. The skeleton is working itself through. The eyes are already sunken in. In a couple of hours it will be over.

Everyone chats and smiles, chats about nothing, shouts and drinks themselves silly occasionally or all the time. They they die one fine day, old or young, they die, tucked up into the earth. That's what it's like. Swarming lives, with no meaning, no number.

This prolonging of a man's life doesn't interest me when he's done his work and has done it pretty well.

Of the 791 passengers designated by Cunard as missing, only 173 bodies, or about 22 percent, were eventually recovered, leaving 618 souls unaccounted for. The percentage for the crew was even more dismal, owing no doubt to the many deaths in the luggage room when the torpedo exploded.

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.

He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth.

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.

Man has a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature... Yet, at the same time... man is a worm and food for worms

Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

Sex is of the body, and the body is of death.

One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that deep down each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.

The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die.

the human condition is just too much for an animal to take; it is overwhelming.

In Christendom he too is a Christian, goes to church every Sunday, hears and understands the parson, yea, they understand one another; he dies; the parson introduces him into eternity for the price of $10—but a self he was not, and a self he did not become….

Why are groups so blind and stupid?" men have always asked. "Because they demand illusions," answered Freud. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real. And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit. It tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way.

Therefore in normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality. We are intent on mastering death… . A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day, but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living, and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it, but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed.

In other words, the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one's own death, which is the peculiar sentence on man alone in the animal kingdom

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this yet to die.

Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression--and with all this yet to die.

It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.

But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.

This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn't feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him. Freud's explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man's physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.