Quotes About Mortality

On the day when death will knock at thy door what wilt thou offer to him? Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel of my life---I will never let him go with empty hands. All the sweet vintage of all my autumn days and summer nights, all the earnings and gleanings of my busy life will I place before him at the close of my days when death will knock at my door.

The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted. He

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

That quality, I said, could almost be called suspense, and it seemed to me to be generated by the belief that our lives were governed by mystery, when in fact that mystery was merely the extent of our self-deception over the fact of our own mortality.

The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality.

Doer, dói sempre. Só não dói depois de morto. Porque a vida toda é um doer.

Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life.

Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Vulgar and common persons, as they carry nothing out of this world, so they leave nothing in it: they receive no eminency in their birth, they acquire none in their life, they have none when they die, they leave none at their death.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

And introduce an element of cynicism and darkness into it and just realize that we're all vulnerable. We are humans. There is a finite end to this life and we're all going to face it and a little silliness can help.

I have always been very obsessed with time. Time's passage makes us all very vulnerable and because we all experience it in our own way, it can make us feel very alone.

If life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up.

It's fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it's harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying.

I think the trauma of giving birth made me feel vulnerable and I wasn't invincible. Giving birth made me feel like I could die at any minute.

I wait for death and journalists.

I don't talk about success. I don't know what it is. Wait until I'm dead.

The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.

Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, 'Step from under the eaves and you're a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.' This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.

My view is that life is too short. I'm not being melodramatic or anything, but when your mother dies in your arms - just you and her, and it's one o'clock in the morning, and you're waiting for her to exhale - you just think, life's too bloody short to argue about the little things.

What I try to get physically healthy people to understand is that they're going to die someday. There is no way out. And dying isn't failure, but not living is, so make use of your time. Don't keeping waiting.

If I got the option of going into outer space and hanging out there for a day and then coming back home and dying the next day, or just waiting around to see if there's any opportunity for the technology to develop so that I might experience outer space sometime in the future, I would probably take the ride today and die tomorrow.

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.