Quotes About Mortality

[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Everything changes." It's not hard to understand this teaching as an intellectual fact; we learn it naturally by living it. But emotionally this teaching means that everything we love and care about—including our family, friends, and even our precious self—will change, transform, and eventually pass away.

You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.

A weird side effect of being in close proximity to death is an urgency.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Death comes for us all. Even for kings he comes.

When I was a child, I used to paint intently. The older I become, and the closer death approaches, the brighter my life gets day by day.

I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.

Some of us find 'relaxing' to be, in itself, nerve-racking. If we aren't doing something useful or, at least, that seems useful, we feel guilty, impatient, and mortal.

Treat Death as it treats us: with utter indifference.

Whooping cough is not a mild disease. Whooping cough, before the vaccination, could make you very, very sick. First of all, there was a chance you could die from it - small chance, not a big chance. You would be coughing and coughing. It wouldn't last for a few days, like a cold.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place. If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose?

My thesis topic was 'The value of a human life.' I asked people a question: 'Suppose you had some risk, a one in a thousand risk of dying - how much would you pay to eliminate it?'

When one is young, aspiring to play for the country, doing well, any hindrance, like injury or being out of form, can be frustrating and a cause of annoyance or even anger. But once you have a close encounter with death, you realise the real value of life.

I shall try. At best, I am human. No less subject than any to mortal limits and fallible resource.

When such partly immune people came into contact with others who had had no previous exposure to the germs, epidemics resulted in which up to 99 percent of the previously unexposed population was killed.

Los principales elementos mortíferos para la humanidad en nuestra historia reciente -la viruela, la gripe, la tuberculosis, la malaria, la peste, el sarampión y el cólera- son enfermedades contagiosas que evolucionaron a partir de enfermedades de los animales, aún cuando la mayoría de los microbios responsables de nuestras enfermedades epidémicas estén ahora, paradójicamente, casi limitados a los seres humanos.

Als ik niet meer zou kunnen vissen, zou ik een grote voorraad morfine aanleggen en diep het bos intrekken. Ik zou een afgelegen plek kiezen waar niemand ooit mijn lijk zou vinden en van waaruit ik een prachtig uitzicht zou hebben. Ik zou met mijn gezicht naar dat uitzicht gaan liggen - en mijn morfine nemen.

Cumulative mortalities of these previously unexposed peoples from Eurasian germs ranged from 50 percent to 100 percent. For instance, the Indian population of Hispaniola declined from around 8 million, when Columbus arrived in A.D. 1492, to zero by 1535.

Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.

Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer's day, a long-running sitcom, one's life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?