Quotes About Mortality

When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better, and the best—and yet this capacity turned out to be the one she most needed as she watched the sands of her life run out.

I am not sure whether the virtue of holy envy requires holy humility or creates it, but the two are clearly related. After you have allowed the other to define herself, listening carefully to all the ways in which she is not you, it is hard to overlook the fact that you and she are made of the same basic material. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The diamond cannot love the flower, for the flower lives only a day, then fades and dies. You are a diamond now." " The flower dies," Jenny said softly, "having lived. The diamond will never do either.

Old Hamlet asks, "What is this quintessence of dust?" Dust it's a dry word, with Saharas of space between each letter.

Life is hard and then we die!

Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

On the threshold of sixty,' mused Dr. Parnell. 'That's a good age for a man to marry. He needs a woman to help him into his grave.

The conversation did not go very well and I began telling him about the people with their trays in the great cafeteria and suggesting that it would have done us more good to go there to be put in mind of our own mortality.

Yet there was no reason why one's death should not, in its own way, be as elegant as one's life, and one would do everything possible to make it so.

The legends on the tombstones are eventually worn away as the stone is eroded by rain and wind and centuries. Better to slip away quietly after having lived as fully as one can, doing the very best one can with the gifts one has been given.

Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could.

Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.

So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient.

Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers has settled—for the area extending from India to Iceland—around the same figure expressed in Froissart's casual words: "a third of the world died.

That the mortality was accepted as God's punishment may explain in part the vacuum of comment that followed the Black Death. An investigator has noticed that in the archives of Périgord references to the war are innumerable, to the plague few. Froissart mentions the great death but once, Chaucer gives it barely a glance. Divine anger so great that it contemplated the extermination of man did not bear close examination.

THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland.

leaving Europe with a population reduced by about 40 percent in 1380 and by nearly 50 percent at the end of the century.

insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth,

William III died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not.

Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed.

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers—danger, death, and live ammunition

Suddenly, Walter was aware of all the things he did not know. There were hundreds--thousands--of books in the world, and he had read only a handful of them. One day he would die, a myriad of books unread, his knowledge of the world incomplete.

There was no doubt what must be done—the law was clear. Written centuries ago, the Lex Caesare decreed that if any woman died while pregnant, the living child was to be immediately cut out of her abdomen. This poor girl, whose name no one knew, was certain to die; but the baby inside her lived and must be given a chance to survive.      Selene was fearful. She had never before performed a Caesarean-law operation.

For a body of dust is a limit to the loving of a soul. It sees a face and finds it fair, forgetting the myriad who are unseen.