Quotes About Mortality

Men cannot come any closer to immortality without going insane.

Immortality is only for the gods," he whispered. "I wonder how they can stand it.

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans…

Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead.

How awful is it to be dead? It would be better to be the lowest, most impoverished, slave-driven nobody on earth than to be the king of the dead in gloomy Hades. And there is no turning back and no way to improve one's lot. That is the fate of virtually all who die.

humans sometimes could be elevated to the ranks of those gods.

The powers of evil were far more powerful than we mortals, and even though people could resist them, they could not overcome them.

Whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion

Death shows that the summum bonum of life is to continue living it.

a seven-letter Latin abbreviation that was as widely used in antiquity as "R.I.P." ("Rest in Peace," itself from the Latin requiescat in pace) has been in the modern world. The abbreviation is "n.f. f. n.s. n.c." Translated, it provides a most trenchant summary of the materialist views endorsed and promoted by Epicurus, Lucretius, and their followers: non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—"I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.

Today we are familiar with the funereal abbreviation "RIP" ("Rest in Peace"). Ancient Romans had something comparable, a seven-letter abbreviation that spoke volumes: "I was not; I was; I am not; I care not." The meaning is clear. There was no existence before birth. A person existed only after being born. After death there once more was no existence.

humans are made up of two competing entities, the mortal body and the immortal soul

What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that.

That morning he had awakened next to his wife, and had eaten breakfast across from his son. They talked about stuff, like people do. We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.

It's the people who aren't scared who die young.

Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument.

Better to be dirty than dead.

Because—dig it—when it comes to death, what can you do but laugh?

Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it's too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It's a man's most anonymous age.

You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.

Gravity is the anchor that pulls us down into our graves. There would be no grave for this man, and no more gravity, either. He had been given a special dispensation.

As pessoas estão constantemente a morrer por falta de sono — dizia Wyzer — apesar de o médico legista acabar por escrever 'suicídio', em vez de 'insónia', na linha correspondente à causa da morte.

And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.