Quotes About Mortality

Better destroy the body than the soul.' ~Rosamond

The good and dear people always do die.

Constant complaints were being made of incompetent attendants, and some dozen women did double duty, and then were blamed for breaking down. If any hospital director fancies this a good and economical arrangement, allow one used up nurse to tell him it isn't, and beg him to spare the sisterhood, who sometimes, in their sympathy, forget that they are mortal, and run the risk of being made immortal, sooner than is agreeable to their partial friends.

A heavy weight fell on Jo's heart as she saw her sister's face. It was no paler and but littler thinner than in the autumn, yet there was a strange, transparent look about it, as if the mortal was being slowly refined away, and the immortal shining through the frail flesh with an indescribably pathetic beauty.

Yes! a gay life and a short one, then out with the lights and down with the curtain!

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.

We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don't know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time's containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

don't know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

He later exhibited an unacknowledged dread of death, and Eliza was perhaps the first to intuit it.

Though he rejected champagne as too expensive in his last days

The Release In those last moments before the platter of salt and dirt lay on his stomach, wax-light had waved across a mute heart, his son waited by the bed. Raised to believe the soul left the body with its last breath, he listened for death's rattle, then pressed his lips like a kiss to his father's lips, and took into his mouth the breath that had given him breath, a life distilled to one stir of air soft as moth wings against palms, held a moment, then let go.

The famed philosopher Diogenes was looking intently at a large collection of human bones piled one upon another. Alexander the Great stood nearby and became curious about what Diogenes was doing. When he asked the old man what he was doing, the rely was, 'I am searching for the bones of your father, but I cannot seem to distinguish them from those of the slaves.' Alexander got the point. All are equal in death.

After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.

vida es eso, Pablo; todo lo que sabemos, todo lo que disfrutamos, todo lo que somos desaparecerá con la muerte. Y da igual que aprendamos la melodía diez años o diez minutos antes del final. Ese final llegará y lo borrará todo. Pero, mientras llega, eso es lo que somos.

Ni siquiera la pirámide más monumental es suficiente para defendernos de la muerte.

el cuerpo que nos enferma y que acaba por matarnos, ese maldito cuerpo traidor que de repente se queda cojo, y se terminaron para siempre las montañas; o que hace crecer insidiosamente, en el laborioso silencio de las células, un tumor maligno que te va a torturar antes de asesinarte; o que resbala y se rompe tan fácilmente

Como no he tenido hijos, lo más importante que me ha sucedido en la vida son mis muertos

La buena noticia es que, si sobrevives, el sufrimiento enseña. La mala noticia es que el verdadero sufrimiento casi siempre mata.

A veces me embarga la intuición de la profundidad, de que somos más que el mero momento que vivimos y que la carne efímera.

sin pensar en que nuestra existencia tiene un fin.

Qué pena que olvidé que podías morirte, que podía perderte. Si hubiera sido consciente, te habría querido no más, pero mejor.

Era una pizca de persona, una mínima momia de boca desdentada y ojos encapotados por el velo lluvioso de la edad.