Quotes About Mortality

Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you — free.

He was also dying, though we didn't know it yet.

When the book was published, I had just turned sixty-one. I am writing this at a moment when, according to my doctors, I cannot be certain of celebrating another birthday.

In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

Also, ordinary expressions like "expiration date" … will I outlive my Amex?

Never did will of gods bring anything forth out of nothing." For, in good sooth, it is thus that fear restraineth all mortals, Since both in earth and sky they see that many things happen Whereof they cannot by any known law determine the causes; So their occurrence they ascribe to supernatural power.

No creo en la inmortalidad del individuo, y considero que la ética es una preocupación exclusivamente humana que no está respaldada por ninguna autoridad sobrehumana.

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death.

Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free.—Kingsley Amis

My father had died, and very swiftly too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was seventy-nine. I am sixty-one. In whatever kind of 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and now have succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

lying on "mattress graves.

Sigmund Freud estaba bastante en lo cierto cuando en El porvenir de una ilusión describía el impulso religioso como algo esencialmente imposible de erradicar hasta que la especie humana venza su miedo a la muerte y su tendencia al pensamiento

And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.

all children are born into a losing struggle with death

I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. ... Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave.

Death is] one thing one is certainly born to do.

We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than an atheist does.

For a few minutes, maybe, life lingers in the tissues of some outlying regions of the body. Then, one by one, the lights go out and there is total blackness. And if some part of the non-entity we called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep water, then it will return to find itself homeless.

Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of?It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed." Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

After many a summer dies the swan.

We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.