Quotes About Mortality

In fixing] on the idea of a universe full of separate, unchanging, persistent things … [w]e also necessarily conceive that each thing must die, must one day come to an end. … [W]hen that thing is the imagined 'I', this prospect naturally terrifies us.

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don't, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity's steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.

La probabilidad de que un norteamericano medio muera por un atentado terrorista en un año dado es aproximadamente de uno entre cinco millones. Tiene 575 veces más probabilidades de suicidarse.

los pacientes de hospital que mueren por una causa que no fue la que los llevó allí: malos diagnósticos (resultado del descuido, el orgullo o los prejuicios), errores de medicación (basados, con demasiada frecuencia, en la mala caligrafía), complicaciones técnicas (examinar una radiografía al revés, por ejemplo), e infecciones bacterianas (el problema más mortífero y más generalizado).

The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.

Elephants, meanwhile, kill at least 200 people every year. So why aren't we petrified of them?

The basic reality," Sandman told the New York Times, "is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.

But if you are told that you have a 10 percent chance of dying within the next year, you might worry a lot more, perhaps even choosing to live your life differently. And if you are told that you have 10 percent chance of dying within the next minute, you'll probably panic. So it's the imminent possibility of death that drives the fear—which means that the most sensible way to calculate fear of death would be to think about it on a per-hour basis.

It's a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren't ready to go; that we weren't smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.

There's nothing about the times when she wasn't funny or sexy, or when she talked too much or about her pissing or shitting. There's no way to really preserve a person when they're gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story.

Youths are chosen for combat precisely because they are unable to fully imagine their own mortality. If armies were composed of the middle-aged, there would be no wars.

in 1326, an ill-fated laborer by the name of Richard the Raker fell into a cesspool and literally drowned in human shit.

But, seriously, when in history did fear of death ever come between a man and his drugs?

Me pregunto por qué los brillantes puntitos del cielo no nos resultan tan asequibles como los puntos negros que llenan el mapa de Francia. Cogemos un tren para ir de Tarascón a Ruán, pero para llegar hasta una estrella hemos de morir. Sin duda, hay algo cierto en este razonamiento: no podemos alcanzar estrella alguna mientras sigamos vivos, igual que ya no podemos coger el tren una vez muertos. (Vincent Van Gogh, en una carta a tu hermano Theo).

The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.270

That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

we tend to think that "we approach death by one year for every year we age, but during the twentieth century, the average person approached death by just seven months for every year they aged.

Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013," Norberg writes. "After having lived, loved and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.

Yes, well into the 19th century, in Sweden, one of the world's wealthiest countries, between a quarter and a third of all children died before their fifth birthday, and in some years the death toll was close to half.

Imagine the tragedy; then try to imagine it another million times. That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

And no, the extra years of life will not be spent senile in a rocking chair. Of course the longer you live, the more of those years you'll live as an older person, with its inevitable aches and pains. But bodies that are better at resisting a mortal blow are also better at resisting the lesser assaults of disease, injury, and wear.