Quotes About Mortality

Our life is to be regarded as a loan received from death, with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.

Life itself is a sea full of reefs and maelstroms that a human being takes the greatest care and caution to avoid; he uses all his efforts and ingenuity to wend his way through, while knowing that even if he is successful, every step brings him closer to the greatest, the total, the inescapable and irreparable shipwreck, and in fact steers him right up to it, - to death: this is the final goal of the miserable journey and worse for him that all the reefs he managed to avoid.

We all feel that we are something other than a being which someone once created out of nothing: from this arises the confidence that, while death may be able to end our life, it cannot end our existence.

And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.

what penalty can frighten a man who is not afraid of death itself?

it seems to me that the idea of dignity can be applied only in an ironical sense to a being whose will is so sinful, whose intellect is so limited, whose body is so weak and perishable as man's. How shall a man be proud, when his conception is a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labour, and death a necessity!—

everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: Today is bad, and day by day it will get worse - until at last the worst of all arrives.

Man is the dream of a shadow.

Require the immortality of the individual is wanting to perpetuate an error to infinity.

A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more.

Life itself is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools that man avoids with the greatest caution and care, although he knows that, even when he succeeds with all his efforts and ingenuity in struggling through, at every step he comes nearer to the greatest, the total, the inevitable and irremediable shipwreck, indeed even steers right on to it, namely death. This is the final goal of the wearisome voyage, and is worse for him than all the rocks that he has avoided.

A man shows who he is by the way that he dies.

O espírito íntimo e o sentido da vida verdadeira e pura do claustro e do ascetismo em geral, é sentirmo-nos dignos e capazes de uma existência melhor do que a nossa, e querermos fortificar e manter esta convicção pelo desprezo de todos os vãos gozos deste mundo. Espera-se com segurança e calma o fim desta vida, livre das ilusões enganadoras, para saudar um dia a hora da morte como a da libertação.

Once the body has known death, it never lives the same again.

It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.

Broyard concludes that "it may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self

What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

Old. A viable die-able age.

Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.

And on Ammu's road (to Age and Death) a small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies. Beyond it, an abyss.

Although you know that one day you will die, you live as if you won't.

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over