Quotes About Mortality

The thought of my mortality - I think about it a lot. I find it motivating. It can be any time that your number's up.

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.

In the beginning the gods did not at all reveal all things clearly to mortals, but by searching men in the course of time find them out better.

Time does not really exist as we know it; rather it's a transfiguration of a concept in which mortality, mutability, is conditioned.

Everyone dies. I just choose the time and place for some of them!

You see, we are all dying. It's only a matter of time. Some of us just die sooner than others.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

We're all living on borrowed time. The trick is to come up with works of sufficient interest to pay off the debt.

Reynolds was thirty-three and healthy and beautiful when she died on December 16, 1998.

I'm fine, she said. But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what it must be like to know that you were going to die, that the trees would bud, flower, leaf, dry, die, and you would not be there to see any of it.

Life is short. Remember that, too.

I think every fear you ever have, every one -- thunder or spiders or roller coasters -- they're all fear of dying. Every last one.

But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what it must be like to know that you were going to die, that the trees would bud, flower, leaf, dry, die, and you would not be there to see any of it.

In all we do, and hear, and see, Is restless Toil and Vanity. While yet the rolling earth abides, Men come and go like ocean tides

But was there any harm in wishing that, among the many thousands whose souls would certainly be required of them before the year was over, this wretched mortal might be one? I thought not; and therefore I wished with all my heart that it might please Heaven to remove him to a better world, or if that might not be, still, to take him out of this...

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy -- and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important... and it is just as you suspected - most of the stuff that you do is just stupid, really stupid, most of the stuff you do is just nagging and whining and picking up for people who are too lazy to love you.

Everyone is born equal; we will all die and shed our earthly glory. Riches, power and fame last for only a few short years. Why do we cling so desperately to these fleeting things? Why can't people who have more than enough for their own needs give the rest to their fellow human beings? Why should anyone have to have such a hard life for those few short years on earth?

Time to get up time to get washed time to have lunch time to go to bed. What's the point if I never get up again what difference would it make? I might just as well be dead. You might just as well be dead. We all just as well be dead! This isn't living. This is…

I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway.

I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that alot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.