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Quotes About Mortality

I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.
~ Henry Miller
Así como la ciudad misma se había convertido en una enorme tumba en que los hombres luchaban para ganarse una muerte decente, así también mi propia vida llegó a parecerse a una tumba que iba construyendo con mi propia muerte.
~ Henry Miller
Convencido de la absoluta seguridad de la muerte, Grover se volvió de repente tremenda y arrolladoramente vivo.
~ Henry Miller
Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time; Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Great men die and are forgotten, Wise men speak; their words of wisdom Perish in the ears that hear them, Do not reach the generations That, as yet unborn, are waiting In the great, mysterious darkness Of the speechless days that shall be!
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them,   Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest and forever,   Thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy,   Thousands of toiling hands, where theirs have ceased from their labors,   Thousands of weary feet, where theirs have completed their journey!
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The young may die, but the old must!
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is an old story But one that can still be told About a man who loved And lost a friend to death And learned he lacked the power To bring him back to life. It is the story of Gilgamesh And his friend Enkidu.
~ Herbert Mason
Consumptive patients, with lungs incompetent to perform the duties of lungs, people with defective hearts that break down under excitement of the circulation, people with any constitutional flaw preventing the due fulfillment of the conditions of life are continually dying out and leaving behind those fit for the climate, food, and habits to which they are born....And thus is the race kept free from vitiation.
~ Herbert Spencer
Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
~ Herbert Spencer
He wondered if he might be in love, but realized it was far more likely he was dying.
~ Herbie Brennan
The common contaminated foods which would be the major source of Sr-90 might be classified into five grades- A, B, C, D, and E... The A food would be restricted to children and to pregnant women. The B food would be a high-priced food available to everybody. The C food would be a low priced food also available to everybody. Finally, the D food would be restricted to people over age forty or fifty... Most of these people would die of other causes before they got cancer.
~ Herman Kahn
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
~ Herman Melville
Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
~ Herman Melville
Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
~ Herman Melville
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
~ Herman Melville
Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
~ Herman Melville
I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the life-time of his God?
~ Herman Melville
Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.
~ Herman Melville
Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?
~ Herman Melville
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
~ Herman Melville
love is profane, since it mortally reaches toward the heaven in ye!
~ Herman Melville
All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
~ Herman Melville