Quotes About Mortality

Life is the childhood of our immortality

As long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled stranger on the dark earth.

It was as if my soul were thinking separately from the body: she looked upon the body as a foreign substance, as we look upon a garment. She pictured with extreme vivacity events and times long past, and felt, by means of this, events that were to follow. Those times are all gone by; what follows likewise will go by; the body, too, will fall to pieces like a vesture; but I, the well-known I, I am.

It is as if a curtain had been drawn from before my eyes, and, instead of prospects of eternal life, the abyss of an ever open grave yawned before me.

The words human and humane both come from the same Latin root, humus, the earth that bears us, to which we all return and on which we are asked to walk together in humility during the time that is ours.

WE ONLY KNOW two things for certain: "I am," and "I will die." Religion is our response. Whether it is spoken or unspoken, conscious or unconscious, inherited or chosen, we all have a religion of some sort or another, for religion is not merely a matter of belief or affiliation. It is a matter of how we chose to live.

Had I been chosen President again, I am certain I could not have lived another year.

I think life has to get bigger to make death seem smaller.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

No way it's up to me to decide which life is "better." So if it isn't up to me...I don't get it, ma. How can a life be saved if a life is lost?

Kings imagine they are powerful because they command armies. But in their truest moments, they finally learn who they are. Warriors fight wars, Asura. While kings die weak men.

death, the greatest enemy, would put in an appearance today. Now that he was here he was sure of it. Death seemed to be holding so many souls in the balance of his reaping hand.

I started to write when I was 11 or 12, doing bad imitations of Joyce. There were always white blossoms falling into the grave at the end of every story.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

The good die young — because they see it's no use living if you've got to be good.

One's death is already one's own. It belongs to nobody else: not even to a killer. This means that it is already part of one's life.

Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless. If we storytellers are Death's Secretaries, we are so because, in our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.

Po motin? mirties laikas dažnai padvigubina arba padidina greit?.

The tombstones are not very different from those in other European cemeteries. Many record the deaths of several generations: the name, the year of birth, the day of death and the place of death, if it was not on the island. A name and two dates, the last one precise to the very day. This is what is recorded. About what happened between, apart from the bare fact of survival, not a word is written.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Pioneering is not feeling well, not Indians, beasts. Not all their riddling can forestall one leaving. Sam, your uncle has had to go fróm us to live with God. 'Then Aunt went too?' Dear, she does wait still. Stricken: 'Oh. Then he takes us one by one.

To drink this much in one session would kill even an Aberdeen harlot.

The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and the two side-posts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on; he takes his victims from the castle of the noble, the mansion of the wealthy, and the cottage of the poor and lowly.