Quotes About Mortality

Make it complete first and see what it is then. But to make it complete is already a mountain of a task, and by the time you arrive at absolute completion, you find that you are already dead, so you never reach that preliminary condition for perfecting yourself.

Flight from life does not exempt us from the law of age and death. The neurotic who tries to wriggle out of the necessity of living wins nothing and only burdens himself with a constant foretaste of aging and dying, which must appear especially cruel on account of the total emptiness and meaninglessness of his life.

Our godlike self-understanding, however, keeps colliding with the facts of death and of the fallen finiteness of this world.

Senza amore, muori. Con l'amore, anche. Non tutte le morti sono uguali

We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

O gentlemen, the time of life is short . . . And if we live, we live to tread on kings. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I (act 5, scene 2)

Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.

We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality.

Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution.

Death is the only wise advisor that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet.

Some people die, others just run out of fuel.

Nothing lasts for those who are born to die, Both fortune and misfortune hurry by.

Aprendía mal y a medias una lección: la gente se moría. Al morir, ¿dónde quedaba?, ¿eran ya para siempre inaccesibles? Transitaba como la cabeza de la tortuga, de la vida a la muerte, preguntándome dónde estaba la línea segura. Y no veía bien a bien dónde pararme para saber que estaba en territorio firme. Sobre todo porque comenzaba una exploración que ponía en juego la apariencia de los vivos.

I was realizing, for the first time, that everything goes on, turns gray, is ruined in the living. That there is no end to our story until death comes and the body decays...

The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

You are a speck. This whole life that seems so huge to us? asall of human enterprise even? Fuck us. We are so tiny," as he said "so tiny" he bent over until his forehead was nearly touching the tabletop, as if he was homing in on the speck that was them. "I can't stand to think we only add up to a blip. I need to think we're more than that." "Deal with it." he looked around as if someone had called his name.

There's no way out of this, it's stark: live or die. Every given moment a bubble that bursts. Step on, from one to the next, ever onwards, a rainbow of stepping stones, each bursting softly as your foot touches and passes on. Till one step finds only empty air. Till that step, live.

Men are born soft and supple; Dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; Dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible Is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding Is a disciple of life.1

I wonder-Did I peek through the veil impatiently, while you slowly forged the bonds that brought me to mortality? And do you now stand where I stodd yesterday, your cheeks against Heaven's curtain, and pray-Pray fervently for me to forge the bonds that bring us to eternity?

Ruth. If I die tomorrow, I'll be dead. But while I'm here, I want to be alive. One or the other. Not the state you're in.

You don't think we can love each other?" She challenges me. "Sure, of course you can. But he could be dead tomorrow," I warn. "Or you could." "And is that a reason not to love someone?" She asks "Yes." I reply "Yes, it is.

We are alive, but what is left of us?

The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.

A man is granted one question when god appears before him. How much do I have," the man asked, "before I die?" Enough time," God answers "to make a difference.