Quotes About Mortality

When your friends and lovers start dying, you begin to feel as if you have only narrowly escaped the reaper yourself, and that it's only a matter of time. Which, of course, it is. In the meantime, there's a version of survivor's guilt to deal with.

The basic reality is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.

the deaths of children in poor countries from diarrhea, measles, and malaria have become part of the background of the world we live in, and if we know about it at all, we are likely to believe that it is a problem that will always be with us. But that isn't so. In the last two years, we have saved a million children. In the coming years, if we all give substantially more, we can save the entire 8.8 million.

Why should people be dying from an invariably fatal disease while a potential cure is tested on animals who do not normally develop AIDS anyway? The

Being seventy-six has a few advantages, one of them being that a premature demise is no longer possible.

In that version of the story, Atlas is less literal holder of the world than beholder of it; he alone among mortals can contemplate the divine and take measure of the cosmos.

Too often people fear their mortality, rather than feeling reassurance about the opportunities they have during their remaining lifespan. They don't fill their remaining time with experiences and human connections, because they're dwelling on the portion that's already spent.

We're all free and equal to die like dogs

Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.

secular people don't believe in life after death, but rather, they believe in life before death.

I appreciate life so much after I see people die. It is always just such a reminder that every moment -- this is all we have. This is it. I don't know if there is anything before or after, but this is what we do know. This is it. There are no guarantees for anything else. So we have to always, always appreciate.

that she was suffering from a brain tumor. It was temporarily under control, but she expected it would eventually kill her. She

If nothing once, you nothing lose, For when you die you are the same; The space between is but an hour, The frail duration of a flower.

Mors certa, vita incerta

Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.

Sometimes I dream-- I'll put that on your gravestone.

Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer.

In this particular lifestyle the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

Io sono vivo, voi siete morti

That's what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever's in front of you. Some darn thing placed directly there, with nothing you can do about it...

We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life;

This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And