Quotes About Mortality

Nietzsche wrote that 'to shame a man is to kill him'.

Until I die again, perhaps. Until the next replay. Then it all vanishes." Jeff shook his head, his arm tightly around her shoulders. "Only the products of your work will disappear. The struggle, the devotion you put into your endeavors … That's where the value truly lies, and will remain: within you.

It takes me about a week and a half to read the typical book. I don't know how many ten-day spans I have left. Eventually the unread books on my shelves will have to be abandoned, or they will join me on the pyre. The book I'm about to purchase may be among them. We all buy books we won't live to read.

a sadness in living beyond extinction,

Los niños aprenden algo más. De vez en cuando los maestros tienen que explicarles que uno de los Compañeros de Libro no podrá volver a acudir, que esa persona ha muerto. Los niños asimilan así a una edad muy temprana que la vida tiene sus ritmos y sus ciclos, y que incluso las personas cercanas a ellos forman parte de ese ciclo.

There are so many little dyings How do we know which one of them is death?

There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death.

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead,

Intellectually, we all know that we cannot avoid death. But for most people, there is usually a wide discrepancy between between intellectual reality and psychological reality. Psychologically, we tend to deny death. [...] Recognizing the reality of death psychologically and not just intellectually is an important part of spiritual awakening.

O]ur existential anxiety originates not from the objective state of reality but from our inflated expectations. The main problem is the discrepancy between our belief that we can handle everything by ourselves and the fact that, as mortals, we have several limitations. Unaware of this, we try to do the impossible: to control the uncontrollable, to predict the unpredictable, to hold on to the impermanent, and to secure the unsecurable. This illusion of omnipotence becomes our torture.

People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.

They only name things after you when you're dead or really old.

Oh! that "eternal shore," When Death shall be no more! How widely differing from this mortal state, Where we but draw our earliest breath To yield it up again in death, Obedient to the unchanging laws of fate!

No Indian prince has to his palace More followers than a thief to the gallows.

Though you have sailed no farther from me Than a quiet bay Beyond a point of cedars, Yet you have been as far away As death.

We are the fools of Time and Terror: Days Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live, Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.

I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another.

Tiene razón Laiseca: la grandeza y la eficacia de un mago se mide por su renuncia al uso de la magia. El mago de verdad, el más grande, es el más pobre y desamparado de los mortales. Porque entre su magia y su persona se interpone el olvido, en la forma del mundo.

The day is coming; double your breath, triple your rancorous goodness and scorn fear, connections and affectation, for you, as one can observe in your crotch, the evil one being aie! immortal, have dreamed tonight that you were living on nothing and dying from everything...

Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.

Do you suppose the human race invented boredom to make the prospect of death more palatable?

some will say that death

When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.

All the corpses in the world are chemically identical, but living individuals are not.