Quotes About Mortality

So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." Thanatopsis

All that tread, The globe are but a handful to the tribes, That slumber in its bosom.

In the past, when Michel had been asked about how the firm would manage without the prolific Felix, he would quote Georges Clemenceau, the French World War I leader: "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.

Yisterday fair up sprang the flouris,This day thai are all slane with schouris;And fowles in forrest that sang cleirNow walkis with a drery cheir;Full caild are baith thair beddis and bouris.

I that in heill wes and gladnesAm trublit now with gret seiknesAnd feblit with infermite:Timor Mortis conturbat me.

As dust that drives, as straws that blow,Into the night go one and all.

Mental agitations and eating cares are more injurious to health, and destructive of life, than is commonly imagined, and could their effects be collected, would make no inconsiderable figure in the bills of mortality.

If death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them from any temptation to return?

Sometimes I think you're just too sweet to die Sometimes I think you're just too sweet to die Another time I think you oughta be buried alive. —RICHARD "RABBIT" BROWN, James Alley Blues, 1927

Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.

Not only is it not necessary to read "Interview With the Vampire" by Anne Rice before you die, it is also probably not necessary to read it even if, like Lestat, you are never going to die. If I were mortally ill, and a well-meaning friend pressed Anaïs Nin's "Delta of Venus" into my trembling hands, I would probably leave this world with a curse on my lips.

All the pains and aches man feels in his life are but so many singultus morientis naturœ—groans of a dying nature; they tell him his dissolution is at hand.

The greatest monarch the earth hath will be glad, in a dying hour, to change his crown for thy helmet. His crown will not procure him this helmet, but thy helmet will bring thee to a crown, when he shall have none to wear—a crown, not of gold, but of glory, which once on shall never be taken off, as his is sure to be.

Why have You made us the saddest animal? (...) He cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can't continue us. All He can do is try to make us happy that we die. Really, He's a pretty good fellow.

We were late among the living.

For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of—what?—of science. Death in such a case would be only another arrangement.

Some may still be impatient to die for the emperor, but the chief point in life is to die of something and never for something if it can be helped.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.

Whenever anybody whom we love dies, we discover that although death is commonplace it is terribly original. We may have thought about it all our lives, but if it comes close to us, it is quite a new, strange thing to us, for which we are entirely unprepared. It may, perhaps, not be the bare loss so much as the strength of the bond which is broken that is the surprise, and we are debtors in a way to death for revealing something in us which ordinary life disguises.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

The tomb lies at the end of every path. Only the soul is immortal. Guard this treasure well. Your decaying husk is but a temporary vessel on an endless voyage.

But I am not going to live for ever. And the more I know it, the more amazed I am by being here at all.

All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.