Quotes About Mortality

When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect — designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.

mejor era vislumbrar un instante el cielo y perecer, que vivir sin haber contemplado jamás el día.

Nichtsdestotrotz habet Ihr starke Hände, ein Messer und eine Pistole, und es ist nicht schwer, ein Grab zu schaufeln.

porque quien se distancia de la compañía de los vivos invariablemente frecuenta la compañía de cosas que no tienen vida...

Even death may die.

It is both more difficult and more complicated to die than people think.

I am dust and my story ends here.

However, Harry, my clock has stopped. The embalmer is rolling up his sleeves. Even as we speak, seventy-two virgins are slipping into schoolgirl uniforms for me. You must live, and I confirm: always put your penis first.

I have learned that the libido, like Elvis and jealousy, never dies. I know copulators of eighty-five. Who said you need an erection, a body or an orgasm for sex?

One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the voices again.

Only the existence of a public realm and the world's subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.

Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.

Ce monde d'objets révèle de façon spectaculaire la partie non mortelle des êtres mortels. Tout se passe comme si la stabilité du monde se faisait transparente dans la permanence de l'art

Fluindo na direcção da morte, a vida do homem arrastaria consigo, inevitavelmente, todas as coisas humanas para a ruína e a destruição, se não fosse a faculdade humana de interrompê-las e iniciar algo novo, faculdade inerente à acção como perene advertência de que os homens, embora devam morrer, não nascem para morrer, mas para começar.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species' ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an "artificial" world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order. The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things—works and deeds and words19—which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves.

We did not care if we died today or only tomorrow, and there were times when we cursed the morning that found us still alive.

from the human viewpoint 'sub specie aeternitatis' always means also 'sub specie mortis

This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.

Death removes us from both the humanly constituted world and the divine fabric. Since man is transitory, he loses both the world into which he is created as well as the world he created for himself by his love of the world.

Death shows man that he is nothing if man does not understand himself as a part of the whole. By showing man his nothingness, however, death also points out both his source and a possible escape from nothingness—from death.

The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things works and deeds and words which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves.

We have no immortal souls; we have no future life; we are just like the green sea-weed, which, once cut down, can never revive again! Men, on the other hand, have a soul which lives for ever, lives after the body has become dust; it rises through the clear air, up to the shining stars!

We have not immortal souls, we shall never live again; but, like the green sea-weed, when once it has been cut off, we can never flourish more. Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars. As we rise out of the water, and behold all the land of the earth, so do they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see.