Quotes About Mortality

Because the memory of those who lie below, passes away so soon. At first they tend them, morning, noon, and night; they soon begin to come less frequently; from once a day, to once a week; from once a week to once a month; then, at long and uncertain intervals; then, not at all. Such tokens seldom flourish long. I have known the briefest summer flowers outlive them.

The beauty of the earth is but a breath, and man is but a shadow. What sympathy should a holy preacher have with either?

The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death

The worm does not his work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow creeping fire upon the living frame.

And I don't speak of myself, particular,' said Mr. Omer, 'because, sir, the way I look at it is, that we are all drawing on to the bottom of the hill, whatever age we are, on account of time never standing still for a single moment. So let us always do a kindness, and be over-rejoiced. To be sure!

I shall never be better than I am. I shall sink lower, and be worse…I am like one who died young. All my life might have been.

because, sir, the way I look at it is, that we are all drawing on to the bottom of the hill, whatever age we are, on account of time never standing still for a single moment. So let us always do a kindness, and be over-rejoiced. To be sure!

Yet the bells, when they sounded, told me sorrowfully of change in everything; told me of their own age, and my pretty Dora's youth; and of the many, never old, who had lived and loved and died, while the reverberations of the bells had hummed through the rusty armour of the Black Prince hanging up within, and, motes upon the deep of Time, had lost themselves in air, as circles do in water.

The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece

Death has no right to leave him standing, and to mow me down!

I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.

We tend to look at these problems through exclusively western, or at least narrowly national, eyes. About 40,000 children died today of hunger. Tens of thousands more died of malaria, and tens of thousands more of waterborne infectious diseases. Almost all of these were preventable. The money spent on a few heart transplants in elderly westerners would have saved almost all those lives.

All humans are Scheherazades: we die each morning if we don't have a good story to tell.

It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.

Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

Life: the insomnia of death.

Life is a mortal maze...

There are no pockets in a shroud.

Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.

Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.

What we call real estate — the solid ground to build a house on — is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong — he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages — only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in.

Death is just a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees.

If safety is a joke, then death is the punchline.

One thousand Americans stop smoking every day — by dying.