Quotes About Mortality

Let me pass this way but once and do what good I can, I shall not pass this way again.

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

We all owe death a life.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

todos los cuerpos, aun los que se enlazan en un abrazo inaplazable, exhalan un efluvio de morgue...una violenta salpicadura de pus

Els xiprers recollien claror de cel plorada en miralls momentanis.

From pulp you are and to pulp you shall return.

I STAND here and watch the people of this world: all against one and one against all, angry, arguing, plotting and scheming. Then one day, suddenly, they die. And each gets one plot of ground: four feet wide, six feet long. If you can scheme your way out of that plot, I'll set the stone that immortalizes your name.

Summer grasses: all that remains of great soldiers' imperial dreams

Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

The to-read pile is more than just a physical stack of books: it's a tower of ambitions failed, hopes unrealised, good intentions unfulfilled. Worse still, it's a cold hard reminder of mortality. Already, I have intentions to read more books than I can hope to manage in a normal lifetime. How will this pile of books taunt me when I'm 64?

The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.

We are grass of the field. We flourish for a season and then fade. Death wipes us out. Yet, we are part of a totality that death cannot eradicate. I was, am, and will forever be a particle within a resurrecting cosmos. My DNA was included in the Big Bang. The blossoming of time, space, and multiplicity intended me, and I will be a part of the unfolding, flowering, and closing of time. I exist within the alpha and the omega.

bleak stretch between January and March when old folks lose the will to live.

I might face death any minute now! But I should try not to put myself in harms' way as long as I can live. Of course it is not important if I die, because this is going to happen anyway. I know my purpose, my purpose is: How will my life or death impact the lives of others?

Motherhood makes you a dealer in death. No one tells you this beforehand. You will become obsessed with all the ways a person can go because while it might be easy to deal with the fact that you will one day die, it's not at all easy—totally unacceptable—to deal with the fact that one day your child will die. Do

Perfection scribbled out or the imperfection that makes you, me, anyone perfect and complete because it includes the truth of our mortality. Get

there's nothing scary about dead people. It is the living who terrify.

Every man dies. Not every man really lives." -William Wallace

If I was dead, I wouldn't know I was dead. That's the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

What I'd like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.