Quotes About Mortality

In Marx's entire oeuvre, I don't think there is a single disinterested reflection on death... I was pondering this at his grave in Highgate.

As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future.

Un livre est un suicide différé.

In order not to be overwhelmed by our accident, we convert even our name into an entity: how can we die when we are called Peter or Paul?

Not to haw been born, merely musing on that-what happiness, what freedom, what space!

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Death reaches so far, requires so much room, that I no longer know where to die.

Once my body gives me the slip, how, I wonder, with such carrion on my hands, will I combat the capitulation of my organs?

A man who has completely vanquished selfishness, who retains no trace of it whatever, cannot live longer than twenty-one days

Nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others.

In each man I passed I discerned a cadaver, in each odor a rot, in each joy a last grimace.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

Everywhere I stumbled against future victims of the noose, against their imminent shadows: other men's lives wore no mystery for The One who scrutinized them through my eyes.

We have always been dying, and yet death has lost none of its freshness, its originality. Herein lies the secret of secrets.

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living.

We last only as long as our fictions.

what luck, what a windfall! I am still alive, I am still one of those flesh-and-blood ghosts. . . .

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial.

One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth

I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more.