Quotes About Mortality

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" — a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

Dying ain't pretty. Death is beautiful.

[I]s there anyone so foolish, even though he is young, as to feel absolutely sure that he will be alive when evening comes?

The first breath is the beginning of death.

Death is just a final breath.

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.... And as to you corpse, I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips — I reach to the polished breasts of melons. And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.

The last breath is as sacred as the first.

If it weren't for death, life would be unbearable.

This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to do is to know when to die. Prolonged life has ruined more men than it ever made.

Fear of death is fear of life— and fear of life is fear of all that is.

A headstone is just a bookmark in our unfinished lives.

With several of them the game of life is ended and they have gone to bed under the willows. Their lips have taken the sacrament of the dust.

Death: the longest of our long-term goals.

Why do the loveliest of earth The soonest pass away,— Like radiant flowers of summer birth, earliest to decay? They come, like angel forms, to bless Our visions for a while; They make our daily burden less, And half our tears beguile. They grow so deeply in our hearts, We make them idols there; Till God, in love, asunder parts, The ties which bind them here.

I rocked her in the cradle, And laid her in the tomb.

Full many a man, both young and old, Is brought to his sarcophagus, By pouring water, icy cold, Adown his warm æsophagus.

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow while another dies.

Probably the scariest thing about cemeteries is that music they play in your head when you drive by one.

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

If you don't take care of yourself, the undertaker will overtake that responsibility for you.

History is but a collection of epitaphs.

And after all, what did it matter? Everybody died anyway, the good and the bad, the efficients and the weaklings, those that loved to live and those that scorned to live. They passed. Everything passed.

I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed. (from Who's Who in Hell)

An' when you're dead, you'll rot the same as me, an' what's it matter how you live? - eh? Tell me that what's it matter in the long run?