Quotes About Mortality

Brother, try, O Child of Aphrodite, try to die: To die is life.

Who can help us from our nothing to the all, we aging downstream faster than a scepter can check?

We are poor passing facts. warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

the end of earthly existence. The coffin, sealed with four

Am I going to die?" "No trainee of mine has ever died." "How many have you had?" "You're the first." It

that every man knows and marks his birthday each year, but can take no notice of his deathday, though it comes round with the same regularity.

nor any special purpose, for a Divinity. Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme

Were they merely mortal remains? she thought, as the air cleared and a billowy white cloud momentarily obscured the sunbeams. Was that all she'd let go, or had she, as her father promised, allowed a falcon to take flight?

animals are strictly dry, they sinless live and swiftly die, but sinful, ginful, rum-soaked men, survive for three-score years and ten.

I imagine that it would be unspeakably lovely to die with the terrible knowledge that I have offended whosoever I love the most and have filled them with bad opinions of me.

The lively is always more contemplative than what is dead and sad.

More people perish than want to. Death comes running with astonishing speed, strikes his victims with marvelous accuracy. These include generals, doctors, governesses, soldiers, policemen, ministers. None of them pass away peacefully, as it says in the newspapers. Their executions are violent enough.

To be alone: icy, iron terror, foretaste of the grave, forerunner of unpitying death. Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another's loneliness strange.

Every book that has been printed is, after all, a grave for its author, isn't it?

The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament—the presentiment of death and awareness of life—and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to a end.

Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.

Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.

Anna, who has always been devout, knows well that Despair is a mortal sin, and now she knows that it is a luxury, as well.

Cattle die, and kinsmen die, And we will die ourselves; But fair fame never dies For the one who can achieve it.

There will be plenty of time to sleep once you are dead.

People living deeply have no fear of dying," wrote Anaïs Nin. Norman Cousins observed that "the great tragedy of life is not death but what we allow to die inside of us while we live.

on your deathbed, in the twilight of your life, it will not be all the risks you took that you will regret the most.