Quotes About Mortality

To us, for whom so quickly "time doth transfix the flourish set on youth," there is something strange, even a trifle ludicrous, in the thought that Zeus, after all these years, is still at the beck and call of his passions.

A man who doesn't reel on receipt of his death-warrant may yet break down when he has had time to think it over.

Death would lose much of its sting for him if there were somewhere in the world just one woman, however lowly, whose heart would be broken by his dying.

To die "untimely," as men called it, was the timeliest of all deaths for one who had carved his youth to greatness

Death was incomparably the greater, the finer soul. Death was the one true bridal.

Why,' says they to themselves, 'I been sleeping; I ain't been living all this!' And they wake up and get ready to live their real lives, but they find that their real lives are just about up, and by the time they find out what they've done with themselves they're ready to die.

If there's anything worse than visualizing your own death, it's knowing that you caused it.

It's a blessing and a curse, the human mind. We're the only creatures on Earth that can imagine our own death. But"—she held up my spear—"we can also imagine ways to prevent it.

J'ignore si les grandes époques font les grands hommes, mais je sais qu'elles les tuent.

Isn't that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The

Sin does to a life what shears do to a flower. A cut at the stem separates a flower from the source of life. Initially the flower is attractive, still colorful and strong. But watch that flower over a period of time, and the leaves will wilt and the petals will drop. No matter what you do, the flower will never live again.

Isaiah 57:1–2: "The good men perish; the godly die before their time, and no one seems to care or wonder why. No one seems to realize that God is taking them away from evil days ahead. For the godly who die shall rest in peace" (TLB).

There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing. So you watch yourself about complaining. What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it.

I don't know how much longer I'll be around. I'll probably be writing when the Lord says, 'Maya, Maya Angelou, it's time.

Life was cheap and death entirely free.

Will I be less dead because I wrote this poem or you more because you read it long years hence.

When old folks laugh, they consider the promise of dear painless death, and generously forgive life for happening to them.

My tears were not for Bailey or Mother or even myself but for the helplessness of mortals who love on the sufferance of Life. In order to avoid this bitter end, we would all have to be born again, and born with the knowledge of alternatives. Even then?

Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people's grief.

My tears were not for Bailey or Mother or even myself but for the helplessness of mortals who live on the sufferance of Life. In order to avoid this bitter end, we would all have to be born again, and born with the knowledge of alternatives. Even then?

Death, where is thy string? It is here in my heart, and my mind, and my memories.

My tears were not for Bailey or Mother or even myself but for the helplessness of mortals who live on the sufferance of Life.

We have to go. Billie looked up from her drink and said, Speak for yourself. All I got to do is stay black and die.

But on that onerous day, oppressed beyond relief, my own mortality was borne in upon me on sluggish tides of doom.