Quotes About Mortality

Some people say that a man dying in a sudden accident sees his whole life flash by, like a fantastically fast movie. To stay with this concept, one might say that in death, man has become the movie himself. He now 'is' his life as he lived it, he is his own life history as it happened to him, as good as he has created it. Thus, he is his own heaven and his own hell.

the fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so.

Everybody dies. And the rest of us move on until it's our turn.

The seeds of life - fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that's born for death. That is the source of all men's fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heaven's light, shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep.

Here, too, the honorable finds its due and there are tears for passing things; here, too, things mortal touch the mind.

Every man's last day is fixed. Lifetimes are brief, and not to be regained, for all mankind. But by their deeds to make their fame last: that is labor for the brave.

Each of us finds the world of death fitted to himself

For each man his day stands fixed. For all mankind the days of life are few, and not to be restored. But to prolong fame by deeds, that is valour's task. (Hercules to Pallas)

Illa dolos dirumque nefas in pectore versat, certa mori, varioque irarum fluctuat aestu.

Death twitches my ear. Live, he says. I am coming.

Do you believe this is what the dead care about when they are buried in the grave?

And war in my hand I carry, and death I bear.

Is death so dreadful a thing?

I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.

The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.

After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.

We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

Death is woven in with the violets," said Louis. "Death and again death.")