Quotes About Mortality

If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

There was one theory put forth by a journalist recently. I have a lot of friends that have died prematurely and a lot of friends that have died of natural causes. I've lost a lot of people over the years. This journalist basically recommended to me that God keeps me around because I amuse him.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all - most of us, anyway - want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there's now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you're next. I don't buy it.

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

I'm not cynical, but the reality is that life is mortal. Terrible, sad things happen. Everybody loses friends and family. I'll be on tour and get really scared if my wife won't answer her phone within one minute. I'm sensitive.

I look back on being 17 and think, 'Oh my God, how did I not die?'

The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.

The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven't.

No one is guaranteed their next moment, or their next breath; yet, humanity has a habit of thinking of its existence on the earth as eternal. Those who are rooted and grounded in Christ know that life is just a vapor.

When a high-profile personality lives like I do, everybody thinks that person is fated to die young.

Thirty guys equals five percent die-off among active wingsuit base jumpers. That means there's a flaw in our system and you're an idiot if you think anything else. I'm smart enough to know that five percent means it could be me.

There is an ancient saying among men that you cannot thoroughly understand the life of mortals before the man has died, then only can you call it good or bad.

I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!

Getting older has compensations, though when you hit 50 you become very aware of your own mortality and it makes you reassess.

None of us, in our culture of comfort, know how to prepare ourselves for dying, but that's what we should do every day. Every single day, we die a thousand deaths.

What people need to know is that asthma isn't a minor 'wheeze-disease.' It kills over five thousand people in America every year, and I could've been one of them.

But how true it is that every pleasure has also its reverse side, in brief, its pain. Or, if not wholly true, how nearly so. Therefore, I have added to most of my pleasures the little flavour of bitterness, the flaw in their perfection, the canker in the damask, the worm at the root, the fear of loss, or of satiety, the fearful risks involved in their very existence, which tang their sweetness, and mind us of their mortality and of our own, and that nothing in this world is perfect.

It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.

The dead do not harm us, only the alive.