Quotes About Mortality

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of inertia.

Sometimes I wonder what if I run off or dropped dead," Francis said. "Helen'd probably go crazy." "Why if you dropped dead she'd bury you before you started stinkin'," Jack said. "That's all'd happen." "What a heart you have," Francis said. "You gotta bury your dead," Jack said.

The dead. No more'n a breath. You let that last one go and you're with them again.

Once someone's dead, being sorry doesn't cut it. If you hit a man, you can apologize. If you destroy his property, you can pay him back. But if you take his life, there's nothing you can ever do to make that right. Do you understand?

Death is no surprise to an old man like me. Being able to take a regular crap, now, there is a surprise.

Life is a blessing and death a deliverance. Both are gifts, and neither is in our hands.

possible topics around which the currents of speech may flow: Death and the danger of death: violence, fighting, sickness, fear, dreams, premonitions and communication with the dead. Sex and relations between the sexes: dating, courtship, proposals, marriage, breaking off relationships, affairs, intermarriage. Moral indignation: assignment and rejection of blame, unfairness, injustice, gossip, violations of social norms.

But Ben Rifkin lay in a refrigerated drawer in the M.E.'s office while my son lay in his warm bed, with nothing but luck to separate the one from the other.

Nor can science overcome the absurdity of life caused by death. Science cannot prolong life forever. It is noteworthy that Eiseley never returns to the question of death, which was awakened in him as a child, to show how science answers this problem. For it cannot. The religion of science has no answer to man's deepest questions.

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life?

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

He wasnt afraid of dying, only of having not done all he could, and not properly spitting in the eye of death when it came for him. That final gesture was important.

It was in the reign of George II. that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled ; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now

So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We honor the dead and abhor the dying. - from the story "De Composition

The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man Just a mortal with potential of a superman I'm living on. - Quicksand

As you get older the questions come down to two or three. How long have I got and what am I gonna do with the time I've got left?

That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide: death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands. ... black people did not die ... the decedent ... took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate.

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?

Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; "The night cometh.

All mortals need to decide how to live their lives. Warriors believe that since we are mortals and we will die, the best way to live our lives is to fight bravely and gain undying kleos. Maybe we are wrong.

The dead guys won't write more symphonies.

Why would you be afraid of death? It would be an inconvenience. I have a lot of undone things and it's bound to get in the way. But, no, it doesn't scare me at all.

You know, I've never actually really believed that death is inevitable. I just think it's a rumor.