Quotes About Mortality

You're always condemned to die. It's just a matter of timing.

People like that continually expose their souls to mortal danger in imagining that they are free of it, when, indeed, the only mortal danger for the spirit is to remain too long without it. The world is made of fire.

Life is so quick that it's all played out at the gates of death, and the value of resolution is that it quickens life.

In one respect it hardly mattered, for the life of a soldier is an introduction to death

Because two propositions can be true at once, he said. Because the world is imperfect. Because we are imperfect. Because sometimes we're called upon to do terrible things. And because we define ourselves in dying, which is, he indicated by motioning with his head toward the arena, what this is. Give us at least that.

Harry understood that those left behind—the failures and the deformed, the suffering and the dead—are not just equal in soul, but that they are we and we are they. Struggle as we may for distinction, soon enough we fail, and, without exception, follow.

I have three hooves in the pasture and one already in the grave, but I have a few things more to tell before I get to the smoke and thunder.

Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The

These bodies are perishable, but the Dweller in these bodies is eternal. —BHAGAVAD-GITA

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

No ship can out sail death

And we the people are so vulnerable. Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time. These chill humors seep through our capillaries, weighting each cell with an icy dab of nonbeing, and that dab grows and swells and sucks the cell dry. That is why physical courage is so important—it fills, as it were, the holes—and why it is so invigorating. The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child.

From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt—older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath.

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.

When a person arrives in the world as a baby, says one Midrash, "his hands are clenched as though to say, 'Everything is mine. I will inherit it all.' When he departs from the world, his hands are open, as though to say, 'I have acquired nothing from the world.

Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?

Like me, they were alive at the moment—today's samples from the current batch of Cro-Magnon man. There were almost five billion of us specimens alive that morning in 1982. We who were awake were a multitude trampling the continents for our day in the light—feeling our lives and stirring about, building a better world a jot, or not—and soon the continents would roll us under, and new sets of people would trample us.

I think that the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all the way down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.

From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt - older, closer to death, and wise, grateful for breath.

To grow old is to fade, to become transparent.

They are all dead now.

Era mais um agente funerário do que um médico; acho que nunca consegui salvar um único paciente. Estavam em estado terminal quando eu chegava; quando muito consegui prolongar-lhes a agonia.

That was never my problem. When they're yanking a fender out of my chest cavity, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered. I'm still here. And I'm surprised by that. Every day.

By this, I mean simply that many times in my life the statistical probabilities of a fatal outcome have been overwhelming thanks to my sins of excess and poor judgment and my inability to say no to anything that sounded as if it might have been fun. By all rights I should have been, at various times: shot to death, stabbed to death, imprisoned for a significant period of time, or at very least, victimized by a casaba-sized tumor.