Quotes About Mortality

Death gives us a whole new perspective on life" Excerpt from my recent journal titled "My Thoughts On Death

Bioarchaeologists have linked the agricultural transition to a significant decline in nutrition and to increases in disease, mortality, overwork, and violence in areas where skeletal remains make it possible to compare human welfare before and after the change.

1. Death is inevitable. 2. Our life span is decreasing continuously. 3. Death will come, whether or not we are prepared for it. 4. Human life expectancy is uncertain. 5. There are many causes of death. 6. The human body is fragile and vulnerable.20

Why does death engender fear? Because death meant change, a change greater then we have ever known, and because death was indeed a mirror that made us see ourselves as never before. A mirror that we should cover, as people in olden days covered mirrors when someone died, for fear of an evil. For with all our care and pain for those who had gone, it was ourselves too we felt the agony for. Perhaps ourselves above all.

Why did death engender fear? Because death meant change, a change greater than we have ever known, and because death was indeed a mirror that made us see ourselves as never before. A mirror that we should cover, as people in olden days covered mirrors when someone died, for fear of an evil. For with all our care and pain for those who had gone, it was ourselves too we felt the agony for. Perhaps ourselves above all.

Dreams are illusions, and we can't let go of them because we would be dead.

Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody had to go through it because you're not born with that knowledge.

Consciousness is the original sin: consciousness of the inevitability of our death.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

As in all pre-industrial mortality crises, it would have been quite normal for large numbers to flee the towns at the onset of an epidemic, and on this occasion such a response would have been entirely rational, for the impact of the plague was far more severe in confined and congested environments where rats (or whatever actually was the vector of the deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis) could breed and move freely around.

Gilgamesh wandered in the wilderness grieving over the death of Enkidu and weeping saying: "Enkidu has died. Must I die too? Must Gilgamesh be like that?" Gilgamesh felt the fear of it in his belly. He said to himself that he would seek the son of Ubartutu, Utnapishtim, he, the only one of men by means of whom he might find out how death could be avoided. He said to himself that he would hasten to him, the dangers of the journey notwithstanding.

What you have actually achieved will only be clear when you take your last breath.

Death in Love R. Garcia y Robertson

Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people seek it.

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order

While he, the immortal One, would not be overcome by death, he would die for the eternal life of us mortals.

Parry said, "I'm a coward. I don't like pain." "We're all cowards," Coley said. "There's no such thing as courage. There's only fear. A fear of getting hurt and a fear of dying. That's why the human race has lasted so long. You won't

Once, on a sleepless night, I elaborated a whole theory of art predicated on simply reminding the ever-forgetful mind of the most basic truths: We float in water and revolve around the sun. We are born out of a woman's body and are made of meat and bone. One day, pretty soon, we will die.

A man, being born, is a debt; by his own self he is born to Death

Life is too brief. I had a friend whom I intended to know better. Yesterday he died.

And then my grandfather explained -in his language- that utopias are not for mortals. And that people are like flies, that the stories they are told must be like flypaper. Utopias are gold-covered paper, he said, and flypaper is covered in everything man secretes from his body and his life. Especially the suffering. And our hope is that its measure is the measure of man, and forgiveness.

Get up, go and be like him as much as one alive can be like the dead—without dying. Conceive him, yet be your death, too, almost. Like him be now, but only till the shadow of his end falls on the shadow of your being.

Los dioses enviaron desgracias a los mortales para que puedan contarlas y que en esta posibilidad la palabra encuentre su recurso infinito

When I shall be dead, the principles of which I am composed will still perform their part in the universe, and will be equally useful in the grand fabric, as when they composed this individual creature. The difference to the whole will be no greater betwixt my being in a chamber and in the open air. The one change is of more importance to me than the other; but not more so to the universe.