Quotes About Mortality

Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names.

Reverence the gods, and help men. Short is life.

The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring.

It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream is man, no more.

I am about to die, and that is the hour in which men are gifted with prophetic power.

Lust sullies every age of man, but quite extinguishes old age.

Man should ever look to his last day, and no one should be called happy before his funeral. [Lat., Ultima semper Expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus Ante obitum nemo et suprema funera debet.]

Man is unique in that, unlike animals, he knows he is going to die, and unlike animals he can do something about it.

A man's life breath cannot come back again-- no raiders in force, no trading brings it back, once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.

God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality.

Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

Man always thinks about the past before he dies, as if he were frantically searching for proof that he truly lived.

Such is the frailty of man that even where he makes the truest and most forcible impression in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish.

One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter, "Beware. You will never get out of this world alive."

If a man should happen to reach perfection in this world, he would have to die immediately to enjoy himself.

No matter how great a man is, the size of his funeral usually depends on the weather.

Greed makes man blind and foolish, and makes him an easy prey for death.

Babies haven't any hair; Old men's heads are just as bare; between the cradle and the grave lie a haircut and a shave.

Man is a transitory being, and his designs must partake of the imperfections their author.

Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardship of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

Man dies but once. My disciples must not be cowards.

It's the same with men as with horses and dogs, nothing wants to die.